s, and are well
content to "go into service."

[23] Some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed
that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary
schools of a certain maritime county!

[24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not
teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must
have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness.

CHAPTER VI

SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION

In Utopia the transition from _education_ to _salvation_, both in
theory and practice, is obvious and direct. The difference between
education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence
the two processes are one. As the education given in Utopia is, in
the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be
continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its
function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature
(with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should
be continued as long as he lives. In other words, the path of
salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of
which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is
in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it
passes beyond our thought.

Outside Utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning
and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception
of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be
achieved. The idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of
perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme
of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a
part in Western education. Salvation, which is the highest of all
external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external
punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness
to be won and enjoyed. It follows that the relation between education
and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of
identity (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection. Or shall we say
that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation
as the first rehearsal of the play?

There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just
as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the Supernatural world and
the world of Nature.

In what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained
admission to Heaven, and,