It is certainly always present in the minds, if
not in the hearts, of every head master, boarding-house master and
tutor in England. These know well what the difficulties are; these
know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a
short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or
else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the
great mountains where the Holy Spirit really dwells.
It is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare
statement of those that surround this subject is needed. There are the
difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of
attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him
as a teacher when he has been attracted. Even those who start out on
their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all
events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that
as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more
and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the
thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity
lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls,
shrink. Now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of
their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their
teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparent apathy of the
leaders of the Church, by their manifest reluctance even to allow
others to make the new bottles which can alone hold the new wine.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81