before those vices of servitude that have smitten Jewry, and it possesses a religion that in its noblest aspect is the highest possible development of the Jewish faith. Deepfounded and possessing a measure of power and influence never before accorded to any nation, we might well become under a great educational influence not only immune from racial disaster and dissolution, but, by virtue of our unbroken constitutional traditions and our concentrated power, the greatest civilizing force that the world has known. No other organised nation in the world has such a record of free development as that which we possess. Our organisation and constitution have stood the tests of many centuries, and, accommodating themselves to all tests, are unbroken to-day. The same thing cannot be said of any other Power in the world. Such a past must count enormously in the contest of the future. But it is not everything. It is, indeed, nothing, if it is not brought to bear on the actual conditions of the contest. New nations have arisen, old nations have been

resuscitated. If these nations lay hold of the one thing needful and we do not, the fittest will survive and we shall not be among the fittest. We must see that national waste is reduced to a minimum; that the nation realises itself in the self-realisation and self-revelation of the enormous majority of its units. We must see also that our educational system creates that sense of inspiration without which a widening national outlook becomes impossible. The horizon of the individual and of the nation must ever move outward. There must ever be rising on the horizon new lands and seas, new continents of knowledge and belief, new oceans of adventure. Rabbi ben Ezra spoke not only for the individual Jew, or for Jewry, but for the whole world when he cried :

"Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life for which the first was made."

Education, self-realisation, must go linked with inspiration. We are at the opening

of a new day as well as of a new century. Darkness is round us yet. The fumes of night still hang over the land and wrap the lower levels. But far off there is an horizon that we never saw before. Yesterday was the day of the few. To-day and to-morrow are the days of the many, when every man shall have the opportunity that is his birthright. At least, that is the dream of the educationalist and might well be the goal of the statesman.

THE EVOLUTION OF

THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

THE modern controversy as to religious teaching in schools had its formal beginning in the opening of the nineteenth century, but the regrettable bitterness that characterises that controversy has its origin in events that lie deep down in the history of England and of English Education. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the schools of the Nonconformists were attacked by the Legislature. The Statute de Hæretico Comburendo of the year 1401 forbade "divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect

to

in any wise hold or exercise schools; and also that none from henceforth in any wise favour such holding or exercising schools." The Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel in 1408 forbade any book from the pen of any dissenter to be read in any school. A further Statute of 1414 directed the justices

to make inquiry into local heresies and local heretical schools—thus beginning a policy of inquisition that lasted for four centuries or more. The orthodoxy of teachers, the imposition of tests for teachers, was thenceforward incorporated into the national educational position. In 1553 Queen Mary took measures to place all schools under the governance of sound Papists, while Queen Elizabeth in 1562, and again in 1581, took care that Parliament should provide schoolmasters in full accord with the new Protestant Establishment. All this was in direct antagonism to the common law which had been fearlessly declared by the Court of Common Pleas in the year 1410 when the Lollard controversy was at its height. The common law of England gave to all men, sufficiently qualified in secular knowledge, the right to teach. The Canons of 1604, which declared that an episcopal licence was necessary to a schoolmaster, would have been totally illegal at common law had they not been passed under the cover of a Statute of 1603 which made such a licence a condition