making more use than we do of litanies. The service. whatever its form, should be conducted with great solemnity, and the boys should not sit or kneel so close together that the badly disposed may disturb their neighbors who try to join in the act of worship. If good hymns are sung, these may be taken occasionally as the subject of an address, so that attention may be drawn to their meaning. Music should be carefully attended to, and the danger of irreverence at practices guarded against by never using sacred words more than is necessary, and by impressing on the singers the sacredness of everything connected with Divine worship. Questions combined with instruction may sometimes keep up boys' attention better than a formal sermon. Though common prayer should be frequent, this should not be supposed to take the place of private prayer. In many schools boys have hardly an opportunity for private prayer. They kneel down, perhaps, with all the talk and play of their schoolfellows going on around them, and sometimes fear of public opinion prevents their kneeling down at all. A schoolmaster can not teach private prayer, but he can at least see that there is opportunity for it.

These observations of mine only touch the surface of this most important subject, and do not point the way to any efficient religious education. In fact, I believe that education to piety, as far as it lies in human hands, must consist almost entirely in the influence of the pious superior over his inferiors.*

"What is education? It is that which is imbibed from the moral atmosphere which a child breathes. It is the involuntary and unconscious language of its parents and of all those by whom it is surrounded, and not their set speeches and set lectures. It is the

OPINION IN MATTERS OF CONTROVERSY.

293

In conclusion, I wish to say a word on the education of opinion. Helps lays great stress on preparing the way to moderation and open-mindedness, by teaching boys that all good men are not of the same way of thinking. It is indeed a miserable error to lead a young person to suppose that his small ideas are a measure of the universe, and that all who do not accept his formularies are less enlightened than himself. If a young man is so brought up, he either carries intellectual blinkers all his life, or, what is far more probable, he finds that something he has been taught is false, and forthwith begins to doubt everything. On the other hand, it is a necessity with the young to believe, and we could not, even if we would, bring a youth into such a state of mind as to regard everything about which there is any variety of opinion as an open question. But he may be taught reverence and humility; he may be taught to reflect how infinitely greater the facts of the universe must be than our poor thoughts about them, and how inadequate are words to express even our imperfect thoughts. Then he will not suppose that all truth has been taught him in his formularies, nor that he understands even all the truth of which those formularies are the imperfect expression.*

words which the young hear fall from their seniors when the speakers are off their guard: and it is by these unconscious expressions that the child interprets the hearts of its parents. That is education."-Drummond's Speeches in Parliament.

* In what I have said on this subject, the incompleteness which is noticeable enough in the preceding essays, has found an appropriate climax. I see too that, if any one would take the trouble, the little I have said might easily be misinterpreted. I am well aware, how. ever, that if the young mind will not readily assimilate sharply de

fining religious formulæ, still less will it feel at home among the "immensities and "veracities." The great educating force of Christianity I believe to be due to this, that it is not a set of abstractions or vague generalities, but that in it God reveals Himself to us in a Divine Man, and raises us through our devotion to Him. I hold therefore that religious teaching for the young should neither be vague nor abstract. Mr. Froude, in commenting on the use made of hagiology in the Church of Rome, has shown that we lose much by not following the Bible method of instruction. (See Short Stud ies: Lives of the Saints and Representative Men.)

APPENDIX.

CLASS MATCHES.

WITH young classes I have tried the Jesuits' plan of matches, and have found it answer exceedingly well. The top boy and the second pick up sides (in schoolboy phrase), the second boy having first choice. The same sides may be kept till the superiority of one of them is clearly established, when it becomes necessary to pick up again. The matches, if not too frequent, prove an excellent break to the monotony of school-work. A subject well suited for them (as Franklin pointed out) is spelling. The boys are told that on a certain day there will be a match in the spelling of some particular class of words— say words of one syllable, or the preterites of verbs. For the match the sides are arranged in lines opposite one another; the dux of one side questions the dux of the other, the second boy the second, and so forth. The match may be conducted viva voce, or, better still, by papers previously written. Each boy has to bring on paper a list of the right sort of words. Suppose six is the number required, he will write a column with a few to spare, as some of his words may be disallowed by the umpire, i. e., the master. The master takes the first boy's list, and asks the top boy on the opposite side to spell the words. When he fails, the owner of the list has to correct him, and gets a mark for doing so. Should the owner of the list himself make a mistake, his opponent scores even if he is wrong also. When the master has gone through all the lists in this way, he adds up the marks, and announces which side has The method has the great merit of stimulating the

won.

lower end of the form as well as the top; for it usually hap pens that the match is really decided by the lower boys, who make the most mistakes. Of course the details and the subjects of such matches admit of almost endless variation.

DOCTRINALE ALEXANDRI DE VILLA DEI.

This celebrated grammar was written by a Franciscan of Brittany, about the middle of the thirteenth century. It is in leonine verses. To the verses is attached a commentary, which is by no means superfluous. The book begins

thus:

Scribere clericulis paro Doctrinale novellis,
Pluraque doctorum sociabo scripta meorum.
Jamque legent pueri pro nugis Maximiani
Quæ veteres sociis nolebant pandere caris.

[Maximianus, says the commentary, was a scriptor fabularum.]

Presens huic operi sit gratia Pneumatis almi:
Me juvat: et faciat complere quod utile fiat.
Si pueri primo nequeunt attendere plene,

Hic tamen attendat, qui doctoris est vice fungens,
Atque legens pueris laica lingua reserabit,
Et pueris etiam pars maxima plana patebit.
Voces in primis, quas par casus variabis,
Ut levius potero, te declinare docebo.

If Alexander kept his promise, he certainly had no faculty for making things easy. Take, e. g., his notion of teaching the singular of the first declension :—

Rectus as, es, a, dat declinatio prima,

Atque per am propria quædam ponuntur hebræa;

Dans a diphthongon genitivis atqua dativis.