All this needs learning by the old, and explaining to the young, for otherwise life will be one-sided, and when the day comes, as come it must to those who think, when a choice must be made, and there seems no alternative to following literally in Christ’s footsteps and turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world, bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life.  Religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood.  If, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to coarsen and degrade the whole of life.

The scripture lesson will indeed miss its opportunity if it does not, in the later stages of a boy’s career, set him thinking on these subjects, and help him to a wise appreciation of the holiness of beauty as well as of the beauty of holiness.  To accomplish this task the language of the Bible itself gives noble help.  All the qualities of great literature shine forth from it and it should put to shame and flight the tawdry and the melodramatic.  It is an ill service not to make all familiar with the actual words of Holy Writ.  Commentaries and Bible histories may be at times convenient tools, but they are only tools, and accurate knowledge of what they teach is no compensation for a want of respectful familiarity with the text itself.

Hardly less important for good and evil are the chapel services.  They are much attacked.  It has been argued that public worship is distasteful in later life because of the compulsory chapels of boyhood.  If this were really so, evidence should be forthcoming that those who come from schools where there is no compulsory attendance at chapel, because there is no chapel to attend, are more eager to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by college chapels than are their more chapel ridden contemporaries.  No one, however, can be quite satisfied that chapel services are as helpful as they might be.  The difficulty is how to improve them.  The suggestion that they should all be voluntary is at first sight attractive but there are two insuperable difficulties.  The one is the power of fashion, for it might well become fashionable in a certain house not to attend chapel.  Those who know anything of the inside of schools know how such a fashion would deter many of the best boys from going, and martyrdom ought not to be part of the training of school life.  The other difficulty is more subtle, but none the less real it originates in the boys’ quite healthy fear of claiming merit.  Those in authority, if wise, would not count attendance at chapel for righteousness, but some of the most sensitive boys might think that they would do so, and might stay away in consequence, and thus deprive themselves of something they really valued.  Two or three, not many, might come from a wrong motive, and perhaps these would stay to pray, but they would be no compensation for the loss of the others.