and even hypocritical scrupulousness.  It is a great mistake to overlook this fact; I do not mean that a preacher should not attempt to praise these virtues, but if he does, he ought to be able to translate his thoughts into language which will approve itself to boys; he ought to be able to make it clear that such qualities are not inconsistent with manliness, humour, and kindliness.  A school preacher ought to be able to indulge a vein of gentle satire; he ought to be able to make boys ashamed of their absurd conventionalism; he ought to give the impression that because he is a Christian he is none the less a man of the world in the right sense.  He ought not to uphold what, for want of a better word, I will call a feminine religion, a religion of sainted choir-boys and exemplary death-beds.  A boy does not want to be gentle, meek, and mild, and I fear I cannot say that it is to be desired that he should.  But if a man is shrewd and even humorous first, he can lift his audience into purer and higher regions afterwards; and he will then be listened to, because his hearers will feel that the qualities they most admire—­strength, keenness, good humour—­need not be left behind at the threshold of the Christian life, but may be used and practised in the higher regions.

Then, too, I think that there is a sad want of variety.  How rarely does one hear a biographical sermon; and yet biography is one of the things to which almost all boys will listen spellbound.  I wish that a preacher would sometimes just tell the story of some gallant Christian life, showing the boys that they too may live such lives if they have the will.  Preachers dwell far too much on the side of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation.  Those, it seems to me, are much more mature ideals.  I wish that they would dwell more upon the enjoyment, the interest, the amusement of being good in a vigorous way.

What has roused these thoughts in me are two sermons I have lately heard here.  On Sunday week a great preacher came here, and spoke with extraordinary force and sense upon the benefits to be derived from making the most of chapel services.  I never heard the thing better done.  He gave the simplest motives for doing it.  He said that we all believed in goodness in our hearts, and that a service, if we came to it in the right way, was a means of hammering goodness in.  That it was a good thing that chapel services were compulsory, because if they were optional, a great many boys would stay away out of pure laziness, and lose much good thereby.  And as they were compulsory, we had better make the most we could of them.  He went on to speak of attention, of posture, and so forth.  There are a certain number of big boys here, who have an offensive habit of putting their heads down upon their arms on the book-board during a sermon, and courting sleep.  The preacher made a pause at this point, and said that it was, of course, true that an attitude of extreme devotion did not always mean a corresponding seriousness of