We cannot serve God and Mammon,--the God of poetry and the inward life, the Mammon of outward results.

The thing is not to be done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud.

The compulsory preparation of the plays of Shakespeare and other literary masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy, or the college student, a permanent distaste for English literature.
The study of the Ancient Classics for the Oxford "Schools" or the Cambridge "Tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a permanent distaste for the literatures of Greece and Rome.

Does it not follow _a fortiori_ that to cram a young child, for the purposes of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such?
I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical.

There are teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions which would paralyse the energies of lesser men.