the difficulties that modern research and modern thought
involve and the courage to point out that our Lord, though in his
short career he changed the bias of men's lives, never claimed to
leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness. It was to a
simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not
extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the
Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the
little towns through which he shed the light of his presence. These
laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from
which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about
all the subordinate provinces of life. The arts in their narrow sense,
philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. Man will not neglect the one
or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ,
but at times the urgency of his Master's business will seem to shut
them out of his life.

All this needs learning by the old, and explaining to the young, for
otherwise life will be one-sided, and when the day comes, as come it
must to those who think, when a choice must be made, and there seems
no alternative to following literally in Christ's footsteps and
turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world,
bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate
himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself
to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school
must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and
intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood.
If, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours
to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to
coarsen and degrade the whole of life.

The scripture lesson will indeed miss its opportunity if it does not,
in the later stages of a boy's career, set him thinking on these
subjects, and help him to a wise appreciation of the holiness of
beauty as well as of the beauty of holiness. To accomplish this task
the language of the Bible itself gives noble help. All the qualities
of great literature shine forth from it and it should put to shame and
flight the tawdry and the melodramatic. It is an ill service not to
make all familiar with the actual words of Holy Writ. Commentaries and
Bible histories may be at times convenient tools, but they are only
tools, and acc