2.

Prayer used on Sunday Evening in the Schoolhouse.

O Lord our God, we are once again arrived at the evening of Thy holy day. May Thy Spirit render it truly blest to us.

We have attended the public service of Thy Church; Thou knowest, O Lord, and our own consciences each know also, whether, while we worshipped Thee in form, we worshipped Thee in spirit and in truth. Thou knowest, and our own consciences know also, whether we are or are likely to be any the better for what we have heard with our outward ears this day.

Forgive us, Lord, for this great sin of despising the means of grace which Thou hast given us. Forgive us for all our carelessness, inattention, and hardness of heart; forgive us for having been far from Thee in mind, when our lips and outward expression seemed near to Thee. Lord, will it be so for ever? Shall we ever hear and not heed? And when our life is drawing near to its end, as this

2

day is now, shall we then feel that we have lived without Thee in the world, and that we are dying unforgiven?

Gracious Father, be pleased to touch our hearts in time with trouble, with sorrow, with sickness, with disappointment, with anything that may hinder them from being hard to the end, and leading us to eternal ruin.

Thou knowest our particular temptations here. Help us with Thy Holy Spirit to struggle against them. Save us from being ashamed of Thee, and of our duty. Save us from the base and degrading fear of one another. Save us from idleness and thoughtlessness. Save us from the sin of falsehood and lying. Save us from unkindness and selfishness, caring only for ourselves and not for Thee, and for our neighbours.

Thou who knowest all our weaknesses, save us from ourselves, and our own evil hearts. Renew us with Thy Spirit to walk as becomes those whom Thou hast redeemed, through Thy Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Amen.

The instruction in religious knowledge would be a good deal regulated by the requirements

of the public examinations. These, whether for the local or the regular University course, are designedly comprehensive. Besides these, accurate scriptural study would be required from all, and some standard works generally accepted might be selected for the tutors' guidance. The Bible itself has its undisputed as well as its disputed portions. The same may be said of Christian theological literature. There are works of great and good men which all would put upon a student's list, just as there are hymns in which no good man of any denomination ever hesitates to join, even though they may contain more or less than others that he specially approves. And happily these accepted works are not so few that the limited time of a young student's preparation need ever be wasted for want of subject-matter. Again, at the risk of being thought a mere worshipper of one name, "Unius addictus jurare in verba magistri," I would suggest that Arnold's sermons, though they have been followed by a whole literature of religious instruction for youth, are yet unsurpassed in the special merit of simplicity, of force, and of sympathy with the reverent yet questioning spirit of those who

are travelling through the uncertain borderland between children and men. The lapse of more than a generation since the writer's death entitles writings that have any special excellence of their kind to be adopted among text-books, and I submit that these sermons have merit which may place them by the side of Butler and Paley. I have the peculiar pleasure of possessing a volume of these sermons, in which the author of the "Christian Year" inserted at my request, and with assurance of unfeigned esteem for his early friend, the signature "John Keble." The differences between Keble and Arnold were, it is well known, very grave, and it is possible that their respective schools of thought may prove more and more divergent. But they were college friends because they were almost boys at college. There is an age at which religious and intellectual activity tends more to unity than difference. It is where boys are growing together into men. There is a place, the genius of which is favourable to the intermixture of religious with other aspirations. It is where boys, fresh from home or school, begin to mingle with those who are proud that they

belong to a University, and in study and purpose claim to have all the world opened to them. That Oxford will ever admit a similar institution to that which Cambridge is encouraging,, and allow an "Arnold College" to make the preparation of English schoolmasters a special object in the University which he so loyally loved, is more than I am at present allowed to expect, though it is one of the "suggestions" I have been bold to make. But I may, at least, hazard the assertion that whatever Keble did towards carrying Christian thought and feeling into the region of culture and taste, Arnold did as much towards carrying the same pure influences into the sphere of action and real life.

CHAPTER VI.

AN EDUCATIONAL PROVINCE.

AS a desire for public education becomes diffused through the middle classes, the revival of old, and establishment of new schools