t without
exception--stern, godly, whiskered individuals--singularly unlike, as it
would seem, to our colleagues or ourselves. The masters of to-day are
nearly all laymen, and laymen with as wide a variety of religious
opinions as the members of the Stock Exchange; but--and this is where
they differ from the members of the Stock Exchange--they will all be,
during term time, formal members of the Church of England. Once again,
formalism and make-believe. Yet what would you have? The schools are
the schools of the nation, not of a sect; and to-day the Church of
England is, within the nation, but a sect. And even supposing the
schools were, or could be, genuinely Church of England schools, another
problem would remain, for within the Church itself there is a wide
variety of opinions, and beliefs without which Christianity is impossible
to one will be mere blasphemy to another. It has been said with some
truth that our religious ideas have undergone as great a revolution in
the last hundred years as our knowledge of machinery, and that the
sermons of 1820 are as obsolete as its stage coaches. For the author of
this notion--and he is a clergyman--this may be true; but whereas none of
his congregation travel in stage coaches, it is very likely that the
theology of some of them is nearer to that of the sermons of 1820 than to
his own.

Now, it is obvious that our experience of political education does not
provide a way out of all these difficulties; but it seems to us to throw
a certain glimmering of light upon them. Several of our boys who, in
spite of schoolroom "divinity" and the school chapel, had more or less
outgrown the religious faith of their childhood, and found nothing
satisfactory to take its place, were led back towards religion by their
interest in politics. In fine, they had discovered the intellectual need
for a religion, and liberalism pointed the way to Christianity. As in
the Middle Ages, philosophy had been the "ancilla Fidei." The suggestion
is that the fault of our religious teaching in school and chapel has been
that it is not sufficiently philosophical. By a philosophical religion
it need hardly be said that we do not mean the obtrusion of a remote and
contentious theology, but a religion based upon a real understanding of
political principles and crying social needs.

"It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that 'divinity' should
grapple with capitalism and imperialism," says the