The need of the teacher will not grow less as the century goes on. The
history of the future is written in the schools of to-day, and the reform
which gives us better schools is the greatest of reforms. It is said that
the teacher's noblest work is to lead the child to his inheritance. This is
the inheritance he would win; the truth that men have tested in the past,
and the means by which they were led to know that it was truth. "Free
should the scholar be--free and brave," and to such as these the Twentieth
Century will bring the reward of the scholar.

The Twentieth Century will need its preachers and leaders in religion. Some
say, idly, that religion is losing her hold in these strenuous days. But
she is not. She is simply changing her grip. The religion of this century
will be more practical, more real. It will deal with the days of the week
as well as with the Sabbath. It will be as patent in the marts of trade as
in the walls of a cathedral, for a man's religion is his working hypothesis
of life, not of life in some future world, but of life right here to-day,
the only day we have in which to build a life. It will not look backward
exclusively to "a dead fact stranded on the shore of the oblivious years,"
nor will its rewards be found alone in the life to come. The world of to-
day will not be a "vale of tears" through which sinful men are to walk
unhappily toward final reward. It will be a world of light and color and
joy, a world in which each of us may have a noble though a humble
part,--the work of the "holy life of action." It will find religion in love
and wisdom and virtue, not in bloodless asceticism, philosophical
disputation, the maintenance of withered creeds, the cultivation of
fruitless emotion, or the recrudescence of forms from which the life has
gone out. It is possible, Thoreau tells us, for us to "walk in hallowed
cathedrals," and this in our every-day lives of profession or trade. It is
the loyalty to duty, the love of God through the love of men, which may
transform the workshop to a cathedral, and the life of to-day may be divine