table to a stage-coach, and chairs to horses, do not cease to use the table and the chairs; they interpret them; they do not interpret them away. And when later the things they used for their high purposes are abandoned, or seem to be abandoned, it is not because they did not fitly body forth the children's ideas, but that larger ideas have claimed a fresh representation, a nobler and a subtler spirit a new incarnation. For all ideas spring to birth in flesh, and keep their radiance within the body which they transfigure.

The common, reiterated observance of a form, a ceremonial of the nursery, the schoolroom or the playground, wonderfully unites those who keep it. But it is a barrier between them and others. To those who cannot understand it, children will not deign to expound it; more than this, they will not even grant that those who share their celebration, find in it, all of them, the same central meaning. Mystics at heart, children jealously guard their fierce solitude.

Yet solitude itself has its boundaries, and the heart speaking to itself strikes echoes from its own walls. The colloquy, reverberant through the silent dwelling of the lonely mind, becomes intolerable for its poignancy, and other persons, different of course, and unable quite perfectly to comprehend, are sought for company. Shaken by their vehement joys and by their passionate sufferings (so slight if we judge them by their apparent causes, yet edged by so sharp an anguish for themselves) children turn from

excess of loneliness and to allay the ardour of their burning emotions to others, even to ourselves, confident of a sympathy which shall be sincere, if inadequate, and perhaps the more comfortable and sustaining for its very dullness. We render then at least the exquisite service of dolls or toys held close in the dark, of dogs against which they can press their faces; it may be that, at best, in an ampler silence, or in the inarticulate sounds of understanding and companionship which children draw even from natures hard with shyness, or perhaps in rare, unpremeditated words, we give them something more nearly matched with the exigent demands of their happiness or their pain.

More nearly matched, but not equal to their need will be what we offer. Much we may do; all we cannot do, and, if we are wise, shall not attempt.

High emotion of whatever sort, whether of sorrow or of delight, brings loneliness; or, it may be more accurately said, high emotion has loneliness as a part of its very essence. Hence the supreme difficulty of human communication. We long to share with others, and especially with our friends, what we prize most highly ourselves, and they, for their part, are willing to share whatever may be communicable; but the heart of emotion can never be fully shared, and we become aware of the bonds of kindred and sympathy most certainly when they serve also as fetters and restraints upon expression where expression would injure and even profane. Thus again, but at a higher level, we are

driven upon solitude, but a solitude no longer bounded by unyielding walls of incomprehension, nor even by the circling pressure of friends who in part, but only in part, take our meaning. We have made our appeal, and in making it gone beyond the range and province of our judges; our voice travels further into a void from which it can call no echo; we are alone, not in a crowd, but in a universe. It is then that the religious instinct, dormant at first, gradually awakening in the increasing and engrossing affairs of men with men, breaks at length into full vitality; it is then that speech finds its response in the infinite silence, and emotion becomes operative and fruitful in a mind which, contemplating itself, sees a diviner mind; then-to use the language of St Paul-it apprehends that by which also it is apprehended.

We shall probably not be accused of judging human nature too harshly, if we say that few minds can sustain themselves for long periods at this altitude. They fall, out of sheer fatigue, to lower and easier levels, and here for the most part they reside. But the mind having once ascended to the height at which solitude blooms into speech with the Infinite, and discovered its counterpart in the eternal, bears always some token by which it is known. It may be a certain sweetness, as of a breath borne mysteriously through airless streets from clean fields and the sea; or it may be a certain detachment from affairs, a detachment which no one need mistake for indifference. It may be a certain

resetting of values; commonly it is a limping gait which marks the man who has encountered his Maker. Indeed, to prolong the period of the spirit's exaltation has something of the indelicacy and stupidity of an exquisite visit at a friend's house stretched out beyond the just moment for departure. The charm which we sought to maintain and immortalise is dulled and lost, and even memory cannot retain a semblance of its brief vivid beauty. To return to the ordinary avocations of men, not without a sense of discrepancy, and yet with a resolute and unaffected intention to accept the reality of them without denying the rare and transcendent reality of that other remembered period; to reconcile these two and to bring them back (for it is a restoration which we desire) to their primitive and natural harmony-this is the last test, and the highest triumph of the religious spirit.

But what of teaching, or instruction? Religion, that living system of fetters voluntarily assumed to tie men to a certain mode of life, is built upon an assumption which the progress of that life confirms. That assumption is the fact of relationship, permanent always, conscious at times, of the human spirit with another spirit which it names divine. It is at least the fact that at all times, and in all places, there have been some persons who have made this assumption and acted upon it. That, at any rate, is beyond dispute; though it may be disputed, as it is in fact disputed, whether that assumption was initially justified, or is supported by experience.

It might, I think, be reasonably argued that even to raise the question is in a sense to admit the assumption, but I do not propose to argue now in that way. Instruction about religion might be given by persons who did not themselves make the assumption of which I have spoken, but who know, just as they might know other historical facts, that the assumption had indeed been made, and is still made, by many men. Even for a fantastic rationalist, an academic Malvolio, this assumption, though he did not share it, could not but have weight, and I can imagine a man very scrupulous to give due weight to it for the very reason that it was not an assumption which justified itself in his own eyes. A subtler criticism than I can here attempt might portray such a character, and trace the movements of his mind as he sought to be honest to himself, his subjects and his pupils. To present to other minds what one does not believe, while acquiescing in the fact that other people believe it, and after offering evidence, the best that may be obtained, upon either side of a debated question, to leave one's listeners to decide for themselves, is a performance which demands praise, not only for the intellectual force which it exhibits, but for the remarkable moral restraint which it attests.

Attractive as such a figure may be as a theme for some philosophic essayist, we must for the present leave him with expressions of respect and of goodwill, and the hope of meeting him again.

Now we must rather concern ourselves with