t we believe that Plato is a greater teacher than Christ.
Our opinion is the opposite; but we are also of Shelley's opinion when
he said, "I would rather go to hell with Plato than to heaven with
Paley." Much that is called Christian is not of Christ. Also there
are no doubt minds so constituted that they will get more good in
certain circumstances from the lesser teacher.

CHAPTER IX

RELIGION

"It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that 'Divinity' should
grapple with Capitalism and Imperialism."--_Manchester Guardian_.

"Politics, in the large sense, is one of the main gateways to the
understanding of fellowship, and of that which lies beyond fellowship,
and leads boys to express something further-reaching than the thought of
the dear city of Cecrops."--Mr. Kenneth Richmond in _The New Age_.

This chapter will be as short as its subject-matter is important.
Indeed, the problem of religion as it presents itself in a public school
is so interesting and so difficult that one might well apologise for
relegating it to a late chapter in a brief book upon an apparently quite
alien subject. But we have set out to recount our experience of
political education; and in our experience we found that politics and
religion lay not so very far apart. Without any very direct suggestion
from us, several of our pupils to whom the Kingdom of Heaven had been
hitherto a somewhat uninteresting abstraction found that they could not
think out to their satisfaction the problems of the city of Cecrops until
they had formulated their ideas upon the city of God. The history of
_The School Observer_ illustrates this well enough. That journal showed
a distinct tendency to become a religious organ. At the time of its
suppression the embarrassed editor was confronted with three long
articles--the longest, it must be confessed, his own--all of them bearing
upon the nature of the Deity, and, lest we should be misunderstood, all
of them broadly Christian in character.

Now, a certain type of clerical head master has often tried to impress
upon his boys--he would try it on his staff also did he not know that it
would be waste of time and energy--that the two hours devoted to
"divinity" are the two most important school hours of the week. And he
is quite right: they are the most important, or, rather, but for
opportunities missed, they would be. For a liberal education without a
foundation in religion is not merely defecti