e; it is in a sense an
_ecole d'application,_ and through it the student, for once in a way,
tries out his acquired mental equipment and his expanding character--as
well as his physical prowess--against the circumstances of active
vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the
"public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been
the curriculum, a vital force in the development of British character.

At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an
inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by
indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the
_terminus ad quem_) is an educational system so recast that the formal
studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more
coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus
shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative
lines.

It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be
accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as
elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the
institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can
change our view of the object of education, the very force of life,
working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is
not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the
following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to
indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will
work primarily towards the development of character.

Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which
works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at
every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion.
As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or
factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to
man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with
philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it
enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great
constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a
type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this,
and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the
point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifu