peace, and by the quick devouring furnace
of war. They seem at first sight to be a verdict of "guilty" against
the teachers or the system in which they play a part. That verdict
will not be accepted without protest by those incriminated, but even
the protesters will feel some compunction, and now that they can no
longer question the heroic "student" as to what he means, and go to
him for advice as to the remedies for this failure, they should search
their hearts and their experience for the help he might have given,
had he not laid down his arms and his life on the Somme last autumn.

For long the need of help has been felt. The teaching of religion may
have been less talked and written about, and less organised by
societies and associations, than have been other subjects dealt with
at school, but the problem of how best to make it a living force in
youth and an enduring force throughout the whole of life is often
wrestled with at conferences of schoolmasters which do not publish
their proceedings, and by little groups of men who feel the need of
one another's help. It is certainly always present in the minds, if
not in the hearts, of every head master, boarding-house master and
tutor in England. These know well what the difficulties are; these
know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a
short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or
else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the
great mountains where the Holy Spirit really dwells.

It is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare
statement of those that surround this subject is needed. There are the
difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of
attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him
as a teacher when he has been attracted. Even those who start out on
their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all
events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that
as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more
and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the
thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity
lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls,
shrink. Now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of
their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their
teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparen