For most boys it is a loss not to be confirmed at school, which for the time is the centre of their energies, their hopes, their disappointments and their temptations; but the loss to the masters who share their preparation would be irreparable.  They may sometimes blunder from want of knowledge and experience, but their will to help is strong, and perhaps not least persuasive when chastened by diffidence.

But all these scripture lessons, chapel services and confirmation preparation will be powerless to produce a Christian education, if they be not held together by every lesson and by the whole life of the school.  Industry and obedience, truthfulness and fidelity to duty, unselfishness and thoroughness, must form the soil without which no religious plant can grow; and these are taught and learnt in the struggle with Latin prose, or mathematics, or French grammar, or scientific formula; as well as in the cricket field, on the football ground, in the give and take, the pains and the pleasures of daily life.

It is hard for us in England to imagine a purely secular education, the very buildings of many of our schools would protest against it; perhaps it is equally difficult for us to realise how far we fall short of what we might accomplish did the spirit of Christianity really inform our lives.

To-day is our opportunity.  The claims of education are being listened to as they never have been in England.  Money in millions is being promised, the value of this subject or that is being canvassed, the most venerable traditions are being shaken.  It is a time of hope, but a time of danger too.  All sorts of plans are being formed for breaking down the partition walls that divide man from man, and class from class, and nation from nation; there is only one plan that will not leave the ground encumbered by ruins.

That is the plan of which good men in all ages have caught glimpses, and which the Son of Man set out for us to follow.  The peril now lies, not in the fact of nothing being done, but in some starved idea of a narrow patriotism.

The war has surely taught two lessons;—­one that the efforts we made before 1914 to guard our country from spiritual and moral foes were shamefully trivial compared with those we have made since to keep our visible foe at bay; the other that our responsibilities for the future, if we are to justify our claims to be the champions of justice and weakness, can never be borne unless we learn ourselves, and teach each generation as it grows up, to face the fierce light that shines from heaven.  All sorts of devices, ecclesiastical and political have been adopted to break up that light and make it tolerable for our weak eyes.  Men have been so afraid of children being blinded by it that they have allowed them to sit, some in darkness, and others in the twilight of compromise.