without sympathy--sympathy that understands difficulties, working
equally in those who are old and those who are young--religion at
school must be a very cautious and probably a very barren power.

Again, the schoolmaster is tempted, and even when he is not tempted
the boys credit him with yielding to the temptation to treat religion
as a super-policeman: something to make discipline easy and
consequently to make his own life smooth. It is no good explaining too
often that the aim is to get at religion through discipline, but this
aim should ever be before us. Man cannot too early in life realise
that discipline of itself is valueless. Its inestimable value in war,
as in all the activities of life, is due to its being the necessary
preliminary preparation for courageous action, noble thought, wise
self-control and unselfish self-surrender. But above all these
difficulties, dominating them all, affecting them all, perhaps
poisoning them all, is the fact, not to be escaped though it is often
ignored, that so many of the traditions of school life, as of national
life, seem founded on a basis opposed to Christ's teaching. It is very
hard to go through a day of our lives, or even a short railway
journey, and not offend against the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
Older people have never been able to solve this dilemma: the rulers
find it more difficult than the ruled. The whole of school life is
stimulated by the principle of competition, and kept together by a
healthy and, on the whole, a kindly self-assertion which is hard to
reconcile with the ideals that are upheld in the New Testament. Yet at
school, quite as much as in the World, competition and self-assertion
are tempered by abundant friendliness and generosity; and at school
if not in the world, there are an increasing number of individuals who
have so much spiritual power that they never need to exercise the more
worldly power that clashes with the Beatitudes. Of this power boys