notes on a selected gospel, or book of the Old Testament. School prayers are formal, and often in undignified surroundings. There are no other direct opportunities of religious teaching, and perhaps no help at all to be expected from the home.

Meantime, the main object of the school may be a pure intellectual efficiency: it would be natural if it were. It has to prepare itself for two kinds of tests. The first is that of the Inspectorate of the Board of Education, who will satisfy themselves that the curriculum is sound, and sufficiently well-balanced, the teaching reasonably effective, and the buildings convenient. Their tests will be of necessity external and intellectual, for there exists, and can exist, no calculus of the moral value of the school. That can only be determined by living within it as boy or master from term to term; and that is just what an inspector cannot do. The second test is that of the external examination. Examinations are attacked and defended, but that question need not engage attention here. They form, whether good or bad in themselves, a purely intellectual test, and indeed a purely mechanical test. The schools are, moreover, frequently created by a local authority and managed by an Education Office under an Education Committee. The headmaster and his staff complain with too much justice that they have little freedom. They have their pupils at their disposal for only a small part of their time, and their whole energies are taken up by purely intellectual instruction, and in meeting the demands of a mechanical system imposed on them by the Local Authority. They may borrow intelligence tests from America, and physical tests from Sweden; but they are still always busy between the intellectual and the purely mechanical. There is surely a great danger that the system may come to be dominated by a desire for a narrow intellectual efficiency, and aim at material success such as can be mechanically measured. There is not much in the action taken by the Board of Education or the Local Education Authorities to prevent this result from taking place.

Yet there is no need for pessimism. The strong personality breaks through all these fetters, and headmasters like Paton at Manchester or Rushbrooke at St

Olave's have left a moral impress on their schools as strong and as vital for good and for social service under the inspiration of true religion as any of the great headmasters of the public schools. And in many ways the newer schools have borrowed from the old, and have applied to their own circumstances, institutions and customs which help the expression of corporate life, and teach service to the community. They have learned, and apply with success, the lesson of organised games : they have taken over some of the good features of the house system, so far as they can be taken over in music, in drama, in all manner of school societies, they teach the lesson of doing things together by corporate effort and in fellowship, all the more valuable because in each case it entails special effort and some sacrifice of convenience in the individuals who take part. This is the something of value that has been passed on from the older schools and should spread far and wide among the newer schools, if those who administer, but do not teach, will leave to those who do teach the necessary liberty and the necessary leisure.

The tradition of English education may be richer and nobler than it has ever been in the past, if the teachers of the country rise to the measure of their opportunity and the greatness of their responsibility. The teachers hold the future in their hands, and whether they will make the nation or mar it depends upon the reality of the religion which will be the basis and the inspiration of their work. Large masses of the population are beyond the present reach of the churches and institutional religion; but no one escapes the schools. If the nation as a whole is to have vision, and to maintain a firm hold on morality, the great part of its training must be done by the teachers. That the ultimate reality is spiritual, that goodness, truth, and beauty constitute the ideal, and are not only the sole values which endure, but the sole values which can be shared without being lessened, that material goods have their place only as the necessary instruments of a life which has to be lived well and in the service of others-this is a creed upon which all could be united, and which if it were taught and lived by those who teach, from the University to the elementary school, would ennoble the whole

nation, and make it a fit instrument to promote that advance from which humanity is now debarred only by its blindness and the wrongness of its standards.

Only in this way will the balance and sanity of character be preserved, and it should be the business of the schools to resist to the utmost every attempt to make them the sphere of party propaganda or the seedbed of sects, religious or political. The teacher has a right to belong to any Church or party, if he so wills, but he has no right to use his position of trust to promote the acceptance of its special tenets. Militarism and nationalism ought to have no more place within the walls of a school than socialism, communism, or individualism. Every 'ism' ought to be taboo. There are always some who want to use the children merely as means, just as there are always a few who would have them regarded as ends in themselves. It is a misuse of the children in both cases, but the first involves the greater danger in these days of unscrupulous propaganda. The children have to be respected as ends in themselves, and, therefore, goodness, truth, and beauty must be put before them as the ideals of which they must build their own vision; but they are also means, since they are each and all the servants of the nation of the future, membership of which alone gives to their lives meaning and power.

The schools are the schools of the nation, and it is fair to demand that they should loyally serve the nation's ideals, and give teaching which has reference to the nation's duty and opportunity in the world. Humanity stands at gaze to-day, for an unexampled vision opens before it. General education, and the continued application of the scientific method to inquiry into the secrets of nature by increasing numbers of trained observers offer the possibility of health, length of days, well-being, security, and refinement, in such measure as the human race has never seen. But, if that vision is not to be a receding and a vanishing mirage, the nations must free themselves from the two shadows which continually accompany their march, the shadow of industrial strife and unnatural class-hatred, and the shadow of warfare between nation and nation. Education, and education only if it is religious, can disperse these shadows. It is

not until all classes have a far firmer hold than they have at present on the truths that material values are a means to an end, and, if made an end themselves, inevitably divide a state, and are destroyed while men fight for them, that class animosity can be allayed. Nor can the will to international peace come about save by a change of mind, a repentance which will be essentially religious.

Yet in all directions this country can do much, if its citizens are fitted for their duty. The empire can by patience and by justice transform itself, as it has begun to transform itself, into a free association of peoples, a type of what the world may become. The education of Africa may be accomplished with success, a task of enormous possibilities as yet barely begun; races yet under tutelage and wardship may be brought to their majority. The barriers that hamper trade can be reduced, and barred frontiers can be unbarred. There is enough good-will still in this country to make industrial peace and co-operation not impossible, if all have an education inspired with a common ideal, if that ideal is an ideal of service to our country in the tasks which it is called to face.

If the teachers are to render this service to Britain, they must lift up their hearts, and seek their inspiration in high places. For much will depend upon what they teach, and the way in which they teach it, but more upon what they are, and what manner of ideals they follow. They are called to be the true shepherds of the people. The education which they give must be founded on discipline, but its methods must be the methods of love: the values they seek must be spiritual, and the purpose of all effort the building of the strong and noble character. CYRIL NORWOOD.

Art. 10.-FEMINISM IN GREEK LITERATURE.

1. Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry. By E. F. M. Benecke. Sonnenschein, 1896.

2. Primitive Love and Love Stories. By Henry T. Finck. New York: Scribners, 1899.

3. Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle. By F. A. Wright. Routledge, 1923.

IN the great mass of literature produced by Europeans since the fourth century B.C., woman's position has been secure. The theme of love has held sway over author and reader. No other subject has been half so fascinating to the average reader as the story of a man and a woman finding their way through a maze of intrigue to arrive at last safe in one another's arms. And no form of this story is more popular than that which tells the tale of pride or prejudice or of some other psychological barrier overthrown in the end by a gush of tender feeling too strong to be resisted. Very often in such tales it is the man who is the offender, who has to learn that, whatever he may in his selfconceit have imagined, there is one woman at whose feet he must kneel, at whose altar he must consecrate himself, without whose benignant presence life is a silly farce devoid of savour. When such a tale is well told, the reader rejoices to see such a conversion wrought; he applauds the degradation and surrender of the hero, assuming that his life is enriched and renewed by the casting off of old prejudices and old habits, and that without the guidance of the eternal feminine the life of man would indeed be 'poor, nasty, miserable, brutish, and short.' Even in books love is a fire that fills the heart with a genial glow and mocks for a moment the inroads of chilly disillusion.

Before the fourth century B.C., there is hardly a trace of such a theme as this. Affection between husband and wife, between brother and sister, was recognised and celebrated. Passionate love was also known-known, however, as a force that, operating in the susceptible bosom of a woman, might produce the most disastrous havoc. As for the possibility of a man yielding to passion, such a thought could hardly be uttered except