It has been said that for the average man in the ancient world there existed two main guides and sanctions for his conduct of life, namely the welfare of his city, and the laws and traditions of his ancestors.  Has the average man much wiser guides or stronger sanctions now?  Is a much nobler appeal made to the children of England than was made to the children of Athens?  Just before Joshua led his people over the Jordan, he instructed them how the ark of the covenant was to go before them and a space to be left between them and it, so that they might know the way by which they must go, for they had not passed this way before.  Once again a river of decision has to be crossed, a road has to be trodden along which men have not passed before.  Whether we speak of reconstruction or a new start or use any other metaphor to show our conviction that war has changed all things, the idea is the same.  We must see to it that the ark of the covenant is borne before our nation and our schools, along the way that is new and still full of stones of stumbling.

Either the old landmarks have disappeared or a new land has to be explored.  Somehow, all things have to be made new, for even the spiritual things have been destroyed or are found wanting.  It is to the schools, to the homes, to the mothers of England that the richest opportunity comes.  If they can solve the difficulty of making the Christian education and the Christian life react upon one another the partition walls between religion and conduct will be broken down for every age.  Intentionally or unintentionally, these walls have been built up, perhaps by the teachers and parents, certainly by the conventions of life.  The result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power.  No one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even from pulpits for all the horrors and the sadness and the waste of conflict in the thought that as a nation we should be purged of selfishness, of luxury, of sensuality, of all the vices that peace engenders.  That is surely a shameful confession, that our religion had been in vain.  We had to wait for, and partake in, a three years’ orgy of cruelty and violence to learn what our Lord had taught us in three years of gentleness.  If we are going to teach the same lessons about war when peace is made, to keep alive the fires of hate, and to keep smouldering the embers of suspicion, we shall be confessing that a Christian education cannot teach us anything about Christianity.