Schoolmasters belong to a devoted and to a comparatively learned
profession. They should belong, especially those who feel the
needs--and all must to some extent--of the religious life of the
school, also to a learning profession; and their learning should go
beyond the experience of boyish failings, and boyish tragedies, and
boyish virtues with which they are almost daily brought into contact;
beyond the dictionaries and handbooks that enable the Bible lesson to
be well prepared; it should go out into the books that deal with the
philosophy and the history of religion--the books of Harnack and
Illingworth, Hort and Inge, Bevan and Glover, and of others who make
us feel how narrow our outlook on our religion is. It would of course
be foolish to drag our pupils with us exactly to the point to which
these books may have brought us after many years' experience, but it
is essential that we should know of the existence of such a distant
point if we are to give to those we teach any idea of there being
beyond the limits that they can reach at school a great and wonderful
and inspiring region which they, with the help of such leaders as have
been mentioned can, nay must, explore for themselves if religion is to
be something more than mere emotion, fitful in its working, liable to
succumb to all the stronger emotions with which life attacks the
citadel of the soul.
Another difficulty is that the teacher of religion is being more
continuously and searchingly tested than the teacher of any other
subject.
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