diligently adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel.  In each of these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been benefited.  We come back to what Sydney Smith said.  Increase of knowledge is merely increase of power.  Whether it is to be a boon or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which it is applied.  Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate conflict between materialism and morality—­between consummate knowledge organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right.  Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood.  What shall it profit a nation if it “gain the whole world” and lose its own soul?

II

THE GOLDEN LADDER

Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound.  It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and “all that is at enmity with joy.”  To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who edited Dictionaries of everything.  So, though this chapter is to be concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my title a figurative phrase.  I might, with perfect justice, have chosen another figure, and have headed my paper “The Peg and the Hole”; for, after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction.  In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire.  He is, in my judgment, exactly the right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and contradicting one another.

When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological disputants, I by no means ignore the grievance under which some of those disputants have suffered.  The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by the righteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts.  There were Passive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time