Sooner or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her work was bound to incur the condemnation of the Diocesan Inspector.
Nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised how lavish of praise and chary of blame the Diocesan Inspector usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received.
I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient, from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the school a strongly adverse report.

Immorality and irreligiousness as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious orthodoxy.

What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.
Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely, from the daily Scripture lesson.

But the net result of giving formal and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the nation.

My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious (in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school (his experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising the people of England,--paganising them because it presents religion to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.
The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct.