Another difficulty is that the teacher of religion is being more continuously and searchingly tested than the teacher of any other subject.  The man who expatiates in the form-room on the beauties of literature, and is suspected of never reading a book is looked upon as merely a harmless fraud by those he teaches.  The man who preaches, whether officially in the pulpit or unofficially in the class-room or study, a high standard of conduct, and is unsuccessful in his own efforts to attain it, depreciates for all the value of religion.  Patience and industry and long-suffering and charitableness are virtues that bear the hall mark of Christianity, but they are virtues in which the best men fail continually, are conscious of their own failure and would plead for merciful judgment.  If the parish priest is exposed to the criticism of those among whom he lives, a still fiercer light beats upon the pulpit or the desk of the schoolmaster.  His consciousness of this sometimes leads him to reduce his teaching to the limits of his practice, instead of extending the former and having faith in his power to bring the latter up to this level.  Indeed, when teachers and those who are taught are living so close together, both, from a not unworthy fear of insincerity, are liable to make themselves and their ideals out to be worse than they are.  It is sympathy alone that can overcome this difficulty.  Indeed, it is safe to say that 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