ame the Diocesan Inspector
usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure
of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the
chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received.
I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in
the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient,
from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge
to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment
intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the
school a strongly adverse report. Immorality and irreligiousness
as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious
orthodoxy. What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and
religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.

Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds
and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial
antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely,
from the daily Scripture lesson. But the net result of giving formal
and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is
to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a
point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the
nation. My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious
(in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide
and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious
instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school (his
experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising
the people of England,--paganising them because it presents religion
to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at
first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with
deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.

The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to
himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no
more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to
be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the
chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain
which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands.

That England is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the
sincere conviction of many earnest Christians. Why this should be so,
they cannot understand. In their desire to account for so di