It is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare
statement of those that surround this subject is needed. There are the
difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of
attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him
as a teacher when he has been attracted. Even those who start out on
their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all
events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that
as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more
and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the
thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity
lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls,
shrink. Now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of
their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their
teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparent apathy of the
leaders of the Church, by their manifest reluctance even to allow
others to make the new bottles which can alone hold the new wine.

Schoolmasters belong to a devoted and to a comparatively learned
profession. They should belong, especially those who feel the
needs--and all must to some extent--of the religious life of the
school, also to a learning profession; and their learning should go
beyond the experience of boyish failings, and boyish tragedies, and
boyish virtues with which they are almost daily brought into contact;
beyond the dictionaries and handbooks that enable the Bible lesson to
be well prepared; it should go out into the books that deal with the
philosophy and the history of religion--the books of Harnack and
Illingworth, Hort and Inge, Bevan and Glover, and of others who make
us feel how narrow our outlook on our religion is. It would of course
be foolish to drag our pupils with us exactly to the point to which
these books may have brought us after many years' experience, but it