m. The Germans, exposed to a like temptation, have accepted the offer
and have fulfilled the condition. They can have no assurance that faith
will be kept with them. On the other hand, we can have no assurance that
they will suffer any signal or dramatic reverse. Human history does not
usually observe the laws of melodrama. But we know that their newly
purchased doctrine can be fought, in war and in peace, and we know that
in the end it will not prevail.

THE FAITH OF ENGLAND

_An Address to the Union Society of University College, London, March
22,1917_

When Professor W.P. Ker asked me to address you on this ceremonial
occasion I felt none of the confidence of the man who knows what he
wants to say, and is looking for an audience. But Professor Ker is my
old friend, and this place is the place where I picked up many of those
fragmentary impressions which I suppose must be called my education. So
I thought it would be ungrateful to refuse, even though it should prove
that I have nothing to express save goodwill and the affections of
memory.

When I matriculated in the University of London and became a student in
this place, my professors were Professor Goodwin, Professor Church,
Professor Henrici, Professor Groom Robertson, and Professor Henry
Morley. I remember all these, though, if they were alive, I do not think
that any of them would remember me. The indescribable exhilaration,
which must be familiar to many of you, of leaving school and entering
college, is in great part the exhilaration of making acquaintance with
teachers who care much about their subject and little or nothing about
their pupils. To escape from the eternal personal judgements which make
a school a place of torment is to walk upon air. The schoolmaster looks
at you; the college professor looks the way you are looking. The
statements made by Euclid, that thoughtful Greek, are no longer
encumbered at college with all those preposterous and irrelevant moral
considerations which desolate the atmosphere of a school. The question
now is not whether you have perfectly acquainted yourself with what
Euclid said, but whether what he said is true. In my earliest days at
college I heard a complete exposition of the first six books of Euclid,
given in four lectures, with masterly ease and freedom, by Professor
Henrici, who did not hesitate to employ methods of demonstration which,
though they are perfectly legitimate and convincing, were rejected