be more impressive to an unbeliever than to a believer. To the latter it is the place of official communication with a Power which, though inscrutable in its workings, has once for all revealed itself to man and entered into formal covenants with him. It is the symbol of a partial—the promise of a complete-solution of the mystery of existence. It is, no doubt, a gateway into the infinite, but into a definite infinite, so to speak, which has roughly mapped itself out, submitted itself, in part, to the exploration of the human faculties, and accepted a local habitation and a name. To the unbeliever, on the other hand, to whom St. Peter's is only the stupendous symbol of a world-hallucination-the monster soap-bubble of an illusory metaphysic-its significance ought to be, if not profounder, at any rate more human and more pathetic. Picture the gigantic effort that went to the rearing and the adornment of this fane; multiply that effort many-millionfold in respect of all the tabernacles, great and small, which faith, or policy aping faith, has reared and consecrated for the dwellingplace of omnipresent deity; think of the hopes and terrors which for myriads of souls have clustered round these shrines and sanctuaries;

then conceive that the shrines are empty, the sanctuaries untenanted, the hopes as well as the terrors mere figments of human fantasy! When you have carried your mind through this process, you will have arrived, not, surely, in "rationalism," but in a sense of inexpressible awe at the frenzied efforts of man's reason to grapple with the problems of life and death, of sin and suffering, of the beginning of things and the end. Who would not think himself living in a fairy-tale if he could, for a single hour, take part with the crowd of living and believing worshippers in the Parthenon, or in the temple of Capitoline Jove or of the Ephesian Artemis? And would not the romance of the experience lie precisely in his unbelief? To the believers, the act of worship would be a piece of edifying, or merely prudential, routine; to the unbeliever from another age, it would be a magical vision, partly beautiful, partly grotesque, and pathetic altogether. But in St. Peter's and St. Paul's-aye, and in the little churches I see from my study window -a cult is daily proceeding beside which the worship of Athênê or Artemis or Jupiter Capitolinus was a veritable "paganism," a village superstition. It has an incomparably

longer and more tragic history, a host of more splendid temples, a more poetic and more sumptuous ritual, a thousandfold more highlydeveloped theology, and a world-wide instead of merely local or tribal dominion. If, then,

this faith is, in my eyes, as much a delusion as the faith in the Olympian or Latian gods, how much greater, more amazing, more impressive, must this delusion be! If I can but read, or rather feel, world-history with that aloofness in which lies the very essence of romance, I need not go to St. Peter's or St. Paul's in order to experience the emotions of our imaginary visitor to a temple of pagan antiquity. Here, in my parish church, I may have the same sense of moving in an incredible fairy-tale, even while

the kneeling hamlet drains

The chalice of the grapes of God.

"And is this to be the outcome of an education in the 'romance' of history?—this 'aloofness' which regards Christianity simply as a picturesque 'adventure' of the human spirit?' No-neither necessarily nor commonly. My plea is neither for nor against Christianity, but simply for an education which shall beget and

foster a lively sense of the miracle of existence. Such a sense is in no way incompatible with Christian faith. Modern orthodoxy has so accommodated itself both to scientific and to historic data, that there is no longer any need for deliberate obscurantism in the training of the young. I am pleading, at all events, not for, but against, irreligion. The heathenism of the average boy who leaves our public schools is the very thing that I deplore. It is bad for his morality, his efficiency, his happiness. It is a calamity to the individual, and a danger to the State. But before fully developing this view, it is necessary that I should say something more of the place of history in education.

VI

WORLD-CITIZENSHIP AND STATE

CITIZENSHIP

OUR bird's-eye view of world-history brought us to the point at which Christianity had spread throughout, and beyond, the bounds of the Roman Empire. Like the Empire itself, it presently breaks up into an Eastern and a Western moiety; and while the supremacy of the Roman See secures for many centuries the spiritual unity of the Western section, that portion of Europe falls apart into the political and linguistic diversity which obtains to this day. Meanwhile, in Arabia, a new monotheism, far stricter and sterner than that of Rome or Constantinople, has sprung into existence, and, being wholly free from the spirit of com