it is done, but the heart
ought somehow to be stirred and awakened. There is room for
denunciation and there is room for encouragement. Best of all is a due
admixture of both; if sin can be shown in its true colours, if the
darkness, the horror, the misery of the vicious life can be displayed,
and the spirit then pointed to the true and right path, the most is
done that can be done.

But we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised. My cautious
colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call
revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional. I
should like to see the Sunday sermon made one of the most stirring
events of the week, as Arnold made it at Rugby. I should like preachers
to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were
to preach about. No instruction is wanted in a school chapel--the boys
get plenty of that in their Divinity lessons. What is wanted is that
the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and
goodness should be enforced and helped. To give the spirit wings, that
ought to be the object. But so often we have to listen to a
conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the
scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need
description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of The Land and the
Book or Farrar's Life of Christ. The story is then tediously related,
and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes
of the Cambridge Bible for Schools or Homiletical Hints, which make
even the most ardent Christian feel that after all the pursuit of
perfection is a very dreary business.

But a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to
the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible
perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger,
a little farther on the way--what cannot such an one do to set feeble
feet on the path, and turn souls to the light? Boys are often
pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and
what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and
desirable. . . . Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Oct. 5, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the
year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly,
enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there
are the hot months to be lived through, treading