in the accounts given by the different Synoptic Gospels of the same miracle, or what is apparently the same miracle.  He may be able to explain the parables more fully than their author ever meant them to be explained; he may have at his fingers’ ends St Paul’s journeys and even have been thrilled by St Paul’s shipwreck, but he will probably have missed the meaning of the good news for himself and the power to treasure it for his life’s strength.

This failure to appreciate and to accept the challenge of religion—­a failure shown later on in life in a certain diffidence about foreign missions, and in the toleration of social conditions that deny Christ as flatly as ever Peter did—­is not the fault of the schools alone.  The schools only reflect the world outside and the homes from which they are recruited.  In neither is there as much light as there should be.  The difficulty of the vicious circle dominates this as so many other problems.  School reacts on the world, the world on the home[1] and the home on school, the blame cannot be apportioned, need not be apportioned; how the circle can be broken it is much more important to determine.  From time to time it has been broken, so decisively too that for a while the riddle seems solved, at all events the old way is abandoned for ever.  Arnold’s work at Rugby must have involved such a breach.  His work has never had to be done all over again and there have been many to keep it in repair, but it needs to be extended now in the light of new problems, scientific, social and international.  For this, as for all other extensions, courage is needed.  The courage to face the difficulties that modern research and modern thought involve and the courage to point out that our Lord, though in his short career he changed the bias of men’s lives, never claimed to leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness.  It was to a simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the little towns through which he shed the light of his presence.  These laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life.  The arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by.  Man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of Christ, but at times the urgency of his Master’s business will seem to shut them out of his life.