I may image forth the position of my educational establishment with regard to the universities, under the figure of family life.

In a healthily constituted family it is the mother who first cares for, watches over, and develops the child, teaches him to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,” deriving everything she teaches from its central unity, and gathering up her teaching into that unity again.

The father receives his son from the hand and the heart of the mother; with his soul already full of true active life, of desire for the knowledge of causes and effects, for the understanding of the whole and its ramifications; with his mind open to the truth and his eyes to the light, and with a perpetually nourished yearning for creative activity, able to observe while building up, and to recognise while taking apart; such in himself and his surroundings, always active, creative, full of thought and endeavour, does the father receive his son in his home, to train and teach him for the wider life outside.  Thus should it be with my educational institute and the universities; as regards the growth and development of man I only desire to take the place of the silently working, tenderly cherishing mother.

The life, the will, the understanding, these three must form the common chord or triad of the harmony of human life, now one tone, now another, now two of the three, rising powerfully above the rest.  But where these tones are separate and inharmonious there they work to discord, as we see but too clearly in daily life:—­

     “Wrestling with life and with death, suspended between them we
     hang.”

In whatever family this chord is from the first set sweetly in tune, its pure concords uniting to form the fundamental harmony of existence, there all the hobgoblins of ordinary life, which even yet often unite to annoy us, will be driven far away, there will joy and peace perpetually inhabit, there will heaven descend to earth and earth rise up to heaven; to a heaven, moreover, as full of contentment, as responsive to every yearning of the soul as ever the Church has painted.

But since all true and earnest life must arise from and return to the ideal life, to life in itself, so must a school of development, which is to lead men, by means of their ordinary life, towards that higher life, be itself a true school of religious training in the most comprehensive sense of the word.

Man ought not to be contented with teaching merely directed to satisfy his needs as a child of earth, but must demand and receive from education a true foundation, a creative, satisfying preparation for all the grades of development of nature and the world which mankind encounters, and for the everlasting here and beyond of each new moment of existence, for the everlasting rest, the everlasting activity, the everlasting life in God.

As, however, it is only as a Christian, be he consciously or unconsciously so, baptised or unbaptised, taking the Christian name or rejecting it, that he can think and act after this fashion, you can see at once the reason why my system of education feels itself to be, and in fact claims to be, an education after the true spirit, and following the precepts of Jesus Christ.