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should be familiar with the moving and beautiful stories of the Old Testament, told in language of such incomparable grace and beauty; with the splendid and inspiring visions of prophets, with the intense sense of personal holiness and personal responsibility which is the lesson of the Old Testament.

If

And here I can only say that it is high time for the authorities of the Anglican Church to make some definite pronouncement as to how the Old Testament is to be read and studied. some leading prelate or high ecclesiastic of unimpeachable orthodoxy would but state in a little book, frankly and without reserve, what it is essential to Christian faith to hold with regard to the Old Testament, how much may be looked upon as legendary and unhistorical, and how, at the same time, even what is legendary and unhistorical may be fairly regarded as an inspired vehicle of Divine teaching, it would be an immense relief to hundreds of very earnest schoolmasters. One does not want needlessly to trouble boys about matters of doctrine, or to unsettle immature minds. But at present the position is profoundly unsatisfactory. How often did I find myself in the lamentable position of not only feeling that I ought to suppress my own views, but that I ought, in order to avoid possible offence, to teach an Old Testament statement as literally true which I did not really believe to be true. I have heard in scholastic circles a colleague of my own criticized with strong disapproval for indulging before the boys in the mildest rationalism with reference to the miracles of Elijah and Elisha.

The result of this unhappy system, this timidity on the part of teachers, is that boys grow up at school in a conspiracy of silence. Their parents do not feel competent to discuss the question of Old Testament criticism, and the

masters will not; and further, many excellent Christians among schoolmasters are profoundly averse to speaking frankly and emotionally of their own religious beliefs, and confine themselves to dry expositions; the result is that the boy grows up not knowing whether his masters care about their faith at all. And then when he goes up to the University or out into the world, and finds that much of the Bible is regarded as fabulous, and that religion is supposed to be a feminine and a clerical thing, the whole of his faith goes by the board.

There is a striking story told by a former Eton master which illustrates this point. When he was a little boy at Eton, he came out of chapel with some other boys after the ante-communion, when there was a Celebration. He and two or three other boys began to knock a fives-ball about, and to shout in one of the old fives-courts between the chapel buttresses, and disturbed the worshippers. Dr. Keate, then Headmaster, came out in his canonicals, and spoke to the culprits, not angrily but severely, and with obvious feeling, about their irreverence. "Up to that time," said the narrator of the incident, "it had never occurred to me that Keate cared about such things, or that he was a Christian at all in the sense in which I knew that my father and mother were Christians."

We would plead, then, that in the religious instruction of boys at public schools, there should be in the first place less reserve about the whole subject. It is a severe strain on many sensible Englishmen to speak of religious subjects simply and sincerely; but it is a strain which the Christian teacher ought to be willing to undergo. It is not lengthy or rhetorical discourse that is wanted. But men should be ready to show that they care, and are not ashamed to care, for the things of the soul.

And next I would strongly plead for more direction and guidance in questions of Biblical criticism. Cautious ecclesiastics may reply that the time is not ripe; that the higher criticism has not finished its work; that definite statements would be premature and unsettling there are always excellent reasons for delay, and for taking away with one hand what is given with the other. But if the Anglican Church is to maintain its hold upon moderate, intellectual, and sensible people, the disintegrating process cannot be allowed to continue further. It is not from theory, but from wide practical knowledge, that I say that there are numbers of parents who are profoundly disquieted and bewildered by the present condition of things. They do not know what they must believe and what they need not believe, and while they feel this, what is the most important part of religious instruction, namely, home instruction, is sacrificed. The parents put the responsibility on the schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster dares not take it. I say deliberately that the authorities of the English Church are gravely at fault in the matter. They are so much absorbed in active work and social questions, that they are letting the essence of the faith evaporate. Many subjects of high importance are being daily debated by the highest clerical authorities; but they avoid, in the face of difficulties, what is perhaps the most important question of all, how the rising generation of the upper and middle class of the country are to be trained in faithful and practical Christianity. They are ready enough to deplore the spread of sceptical influences, and to wonder pathetically why men tend to absent themselves from the services of the Church; but they do not attempt to hallow and consecrate the fountain-head. How many headmasters even are there who give their assistants any direction in the matter,

or who anxiously confer as to what the policy of teachers is to be on these points? The only effort made, at the instigation of some very earnest Anglicans, when I was at Eton, was to add a certain amount of Church history to the school curriculum. This was, I consider, a mistake, because it was a species of denominationalism. Church history, at all events in its later stages, is seldom written from an unbiased point of view; if it were quite fairly written, it would be a highly unedifying chapter of human development, and would probably only produce a deepseated disgust of all sectarianism; as a matter of fact, it is generally written with a parti pris, and every sect and denomination deduces from Church history nothing but the essential rightness of its own separatism. The Roman Catholic deduces from Church history its own indefeasible claim to be the main stream of Christianity; the Anglican deduces from it his belief that his own communion best represents the primitive Church; the Nonconformist deduces from it the evils of prelacy and ecclesiastical policy. If we could find anywhere a sect which had been converted out of disunion by the impartial study of Church history, we might think it a desirable form of instruction for the young: but as it is, Church history is only used to justitify separatism and disunion; while the desirable thing for the young is to appreciate if possible the essential unity of Christian communities, rather than their tendency to acrimonious divergence. A far better species of instruction is, as I have said, the study of the lives of Christian-minded men, of whatever communion they may have been; and a boy is better initiated into the secret of Christian life by apprehending the noble qualities that made such men, say, as Francis of Assisi, Father Damien, John Wesley, and Bishop Heber into saints and evangelists, than if he

understood the underlying heresies of the Monophysites and the Gnostics. One of the qualities which can be depended upon in most boys is an admiration for the heroic temper; and it is surely better that a boy should be able to feel the nobleness and unselfishness of great Christian leaders, than be made to understand the errors of their doctrinal positions from the point of view of Anglicanism. It is, indeed, an impossible thesis to maintain, in the presence of the annals of the saints, that the great Christian qualities are vitiThe National Review.

ated by doctrinal differences; and, if it were possible to demonstrate it, such demonstration is hardly likely to sow the qualities which one desires to implant in growing boys. It is quite clear from the Synoptic Gospels that the instruction which Christ gave to His followers was poetical and practical rather than doctrinal and speculative; and we cannot be far wrong if we base the teaching of our boys in religious matters on the type of teaching which our Divine Founder gave to those who heard Him.

Arthur C. Benson.

THE WARWICK PAGEANT.

"Merrie England!" We have dreamed of it, and worked for it; but still it has seemed very far off, divided from us by great distances of sombre thought and habit, blotted out by the dust and fog of selfish, breathless labor, and the evil melancholy of compulsory, mechanic toil. The spirit of delight seemed to have taken flight once and for all from this unhappy land, and the stories of masque and pageant on green swards, under the open sky, seemed but a mocking echo from a buried past. Oriana and The Merry Wives-the frank gaieties and freehearted merriments of the Elizabethan age-the pageants of Windsor and Kenilworth-all seemed to lie far away behind us, separated by a great gulf. Our very atmosphere seemed to smile an ironic smile. The smoke of factory chimneys had fallen-so some said-like a pall over the corpse of that dear, dead England. Gaiety, so long banished from the heart of the English people, seemed to know of no guise for her return except the dull and ugly revelry of the drinkshop and the shabby, greedy motley of the racecourse. The only surviving sign of pageantry in England seemed to be the plumed

hearses of our costly and unsightly funerals. The Nemesis of banished joy seemed to lie on our provincial towns "heavy as frost, deep almost as life!"

But there were men who did not despair of England, and believed that what once had been under English suns could be again. They had great faith, these men. They even believed that the dramatic instinct of the people could be lifted from the gutter of the music-hall and used once more, as in Periclean Greece and Elizabethan England, for high national ends-to awaken great memories, arouse great hopes, create new prides. They saw that the chief intellectual want of England was a sense of its own past-a consciousness of its own great story. For a mean future awaits those nations who live only in the present.

With such aims they could not walk better than in the footsteps of Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as a woman, knew the power of display: she appealed to the eye. Her weapon was the pageant. Why should not that be their weapon too?

And so, at Sherborne last year, at Warwick this year, and at Bury St. Ed

mund's next year, the English pageant is coming back into our national life and reviving that lost art of conscious, multitudinous delight.

The essence of the pageant is that it should be a common function-not merely witnessed, but shared in by the whole community. At Warwick this year, as in Sherborne in 1905, almost every family in the town, from the highest to the lowest, must have provided one member-man, woman, boy, or girl to strut an hour upon the sward of Warwick Castle. For this one week of performance the town of Warwick has been in travail for a whole year. Two thousand Warwickians have played their part without fee, reward, or advertisement. Many have provided their own costume. From the castle to the meanest cottage, all have helped. Those who cannot act have prepared bunting to deck the old, gray tower in a robe of many hues. Every Warwick institution, from the corporation to the schools and the almshouses, have joined hands in patriotic fellow-working, and put aside all graver tasks for one week of noble, disciplined, and elevating joy. Surely, the most cheering social sign of the new century.

The theme of the modern pageant, as worked out by the skilful and untiring hands of Mr. Louis Parker, is like the widening circle sent out by the fall of a little pebble in a still water. It starts with the early beginnings of the particular city, and spreads out from that point into the greater story of the whole country-through the early legends and traditions of the town of Warwick to the great national story represented by the scene of Elizabeth's visit, the splendid climax of the whole series of scenes. "Local gag," say the vulgar, and yawn at the earlier scenes foolishly and selfishly ignoring the fact that

the pageant is essentially a local glorification, to which outsiders are invited as guests, whose politeness is presumed. Others will find a new suggestiveness in this gradual widening from the petty affairs of a village into the great struggles of the disputed English monarchy-until in Leicester, the lord of Kenilworth, the little story of Warwick opens out into the "spacious times" of his great mistress. The vast stage a veritable country-side-gives play for quick movement and bold action. The pageant flashes past in a series of episodes, spaced like a Greek play with chorus-odes, freely dipping from time to time into Marlowe and Shakespeare, never broken by the fall of a curtain. The wonder and delight of the piece is not so much in the individual acting-though that is almost without exception admirable-as in the multitude of the players, all skilfully grouped, beautifully costumed, splendidly drilled. It is not a play of "stars," but of a whole town.

But, after all, the abiding marvel is the stage. With excellent public spirit, Lord and Lady Warwick have lent their grounds for the performance, and a great stand, capable of holding 5000 people, had been erected in part of that noble space that lies west of the castle -a great open lawn, more than a hundred yards wide and five hundred deep, flanked on either side with trees in their full midsummer pomp of foliage. This scene is backed on one side by the placid Avon, gentlest of streams, and on the other by a forest-road disappearing down a long vista of trees. But the eye ranges much further, over placid English landscape with mighty oaks and elms, and deer grazing calmly among the green bracken and underwood. On such a stage anything is possible. Cavalcades can manoeuvrecrowds can assemble-battles can be fought-processions can march-horsemen can gallop wildly, and troops of

armored cavalry can beat their hoofs against the noiseless grass. All these things are done, and Mr. Parker has left no chance unused.

By a fortunate gift of fate there has been to-day neither rain nor wind. The scene lay before us in such absolute stillness that it was possible to feed on a lovely and pleasing illusion-to nurse the subtle and luxurious flattery that this work of nature was really a fabric of human art-that all this show of trees and grass and river, was created by the scene-painter's brush. Movement had no effect on this sweet vanity of fancy. When the feeding deer in the background lifted up their heads, or Elizabeth's barge moved down the river, rowed by a hundred oars, you simply saw another triumph of the theatrical art-another victory of the machine. So strangely was reality mixed with phantasy in this spectacle. The Speaker.

Behind, and above all, was the triumph of association. The real mental setting to the pageant was that old English town, with its Elizabethan houses still smoking with living hearthfires-the long, straggling street, with its archwayed towers, and ancient "hospital"-the gray castellated walls of that noble castle mirrored in the still Avon and embosomed in the soft rich

glory of her mighty trees. The past spoke with a hundred voices. The players seemed far more than the spectators of to-day the fit and true human setting to this lovely dowry of ancient beauty.

Such towns-and there are many such in England-are theatres ready and prepared. There is little need of human art. Here is the stage already furnished.

Harold Spender.

THE DOMINION'S FORTIETH BIRTHDAY.

The destinies of the British Empire will be decided in British North America. Chatham's phrase, coined a century and a half ago, is as profound today as it was then. Canada is the keystone of our Imperial arch, the link which connects our Colonial tradition with the Elizabethans. For, if our Imperial continuity received a shock from the secession of the Thirteen States, it was not broken. The Constitutional question, which was settled in America by the creation of the Republic, was settled in Canada by the creation of the Dominion. That is to say, the origin of the one was revolt, the origin of the other was unity. Unfortunately the Little Englander never realizes that Imperialism is historic, and that Canada is the mightiest expression of Colonial loyalty. For she was founded by exiles, whose ideal was a

United Empire. So great was their fidelity that they sacrificed position, country, and fortune to it. The story of the Huguenots and Pilgrim Fathers is among the most inspiring in the world's history, but it lacks the intensity of the story of the American loyalists. Moreover, they alone have preserved their ideal untouched by the materialism of the age, whereas neither the Huguenots nor the Pilgrim Fathers are a living force at all. Canada is unique as a State inasmuch as she was brought into being by the moral and spiritual forces which are the foundation of all religion. Her Imperialism has been sanctified by suffering.

This is the cardinal fact of her history. She has been truer to the principles which gave us our world supremacy than the Mother-country herself has been. Until the South African war,

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