ikely to promote it. It will direct itself
spontaneously to departments of suffering to which the Church had not
directed it. But we should be foolish to rely on this free growth and
spontaneous application of sympathy. It must be cultivated: our
generation must be educated to a sense of its value. As far as the child
is concerned, the need is plain. Children do not merely have veins of
cruelty; they have, as comparative psychology knows, the blood and
impulses of primitive man. The general impulse of a healthy boy is to
exact an eye for an eye: the impulse which it is the supreme care of a
modern State to curb in its citizens. To educate such children in
military history, whether of ancient Jews or medieval Englishmen or
modern Germans, is, as William II knows, the best means of maintaining
war. As to the New Testament, its language is not addressed to children,
its sentiments are often so obviously impracticable that it defeats the
end of education, and its precepts and counsels are so emphatically
based on a disputable reward in heaven that their ethic savours of a
risky commercial speculation. We must abandon "Bible lessons," and teach
children to be human.

But for the work of education to end when the child leaves the school is
one of the crudities of our elementary civilisation. The human material
is just becoming fit for the efforts of the educator when the child
leaves school, yet from that moment we leave it to the casual and
largely pernicious influences of its environment. Some day, perhaps, our
education department will be more seriously concerned about the youth
and the adult than about impressing a few facts of history and geography
on the memory of the child: even if it did no more than organise and
direct the innumerable foundations and voluntary organisations which
actually exist, and bring them into living and practical contact with
our splendid museums and libraries and art-collections, a vast amount
could be done in the education of the adult. Meantime a persistent,
comprehensive, intensely earnest propaganda of peace is needed. Since I
wrote a little work on those lines in 1899 I have had fifteen years'
experience of preaching the gospel of peace, and know well how
convincing are its arguments and how little it has to overcome except
inertia. We need only to help the imagination of the mass of people; to
put clearly before them the comparative easiness and the incalculable
value of the change. Chri