boys
seldom talk, except to some specially sympathetic ear at some
specially heart-opening moment, but many are dumbly aware of it and
they cultivate it, often unconsciously but to the great gain of those
around them, by prayer and faithful worship. But even these richer
natures are uncomfortably conscious that there is a conflict between
what Christ commands and what the world advises. That conflict will
not cease until faith has more power over our lives. It cannot grow
naturally at school among boys, when it does not live in the nation
among men; but it would indeed be faithless to miss, through fear of
the world's withering power, any opportunity of quickening pure
religion among the young. Though these opportunities vary very much in
the day and the boarding school, they may be said to occur:

(1) In the scripture lesson;

(2) In the services whether held in chapel or, as is often the case
especially in day schools, in the hall;

(3) In the preparation for confirmation;

(4) In all lessons in and out of school.

There is a great difference of opinion as to what should be taught in
the scripture lesson, and who should teach it. It is easy enough to
quote instances of extraordinary ignorance, to argue that, because a
man who is in the trenches shocks his chaplain by his real or
affected neglect of the facts of Bible history or the dogmas of the
Church, therefore he has never had an opportunity of learning them;
that same man would probably not give a much more impressive account
of the profane subjects in the school curriculum. There is, too, the
fact that a man may have forgotten everything of a subject and yet may
have learnt much from it. Every teacher knows this, if every schoolboy
does not. No one shrinks so much from revealing what he knows as the
boy who is conscious that he has learnt a thing and is not sure that
he can show his knowledge accurately. No subject has been left so free
from what is supposed to be the sterilising influence of examinations
as divinity. In many schools there have been one or two inspiring
teachers of this subject who justify this system, but on the whole the
result does not confirm the opinion that all would be well if we could
have complete freedom from examinations. If in the future the harvest
in religion is to be more worthy of the seed that is sown and the
trouble of cultivation, we must face with more frankness, especially
in the later years of a boy's life, all the di