insight into the heart of the great sufferers, the burden bearers and mangled in the world's highway of sorrow. He heard with sensitive ear the moans and cries in the tragedies of life. The undertone of grief in millions who worked in the lonely fields or crawled in city hovels never reached his ear. Their sorrow was offensive, their poverty the stagnation of the common lot. Some inward destiny swept onward those souls of lofty station to the brink. On the knotted skeins of their lives he placed his finger only to point out its hopeless tangle. With folded hands and bowed head he brooded over the wayward workings of that fierce destiny. But these were the sorrows of princes; what could the rabble know of such pangs and bereavements?

Undoubtedly Shakespeare did not think of himself as a great man. What he did was done so easily that he never dreamed that no other man living in the world could come near to it. What hints we can gather from the stories about him suggest that he was never oppressed by any loneliness or loftiness of genius. If his inward companionship were with souls like Hamlet his outward friendship was freely given. "This plainness, this almost prosaic camaraderie," says Mr. Chesterton, "is the note of all very great minds. All very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming their point of view to be the one which was human and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man." Shakespeare's Stratford neighbors found him a jolly companion who knew the price of land and would sue for debt. He did not walk like a king nor talk like a Roman senator. And they missed immortality by failing to make any notes about him. A Boswell among them would have made the whole world his debtor. He cared so much for his moderate and ordinary triumphs at Stratford, he was so close to the common citizen in his real life, that we wonder why no sympathy, no hint of it even, is revealed in his world of dreams, or why these children of his brain are so far from the men of flesh and blood who laughed at his nimble wit in rustic England. So completely was even his giant spirit walled in by the limitations of his age that it was easier for that creative fancy to "call up spirits from the vasty deep" than to see tragedy or even comedy in the quick and potent generations be

neath his eyes. His only play with contemporary life in its scenes is the coarse and rollicking farce, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps the legend is true and this was written in fourteen days at Queen Elizabeth's command. At least he put no heart in it. It is shop work. Why could not Shakespeare catch the note of human tenderness like Burns? Because this discerning of spirits is not for genius; it is the work of spiritual appreciation that comes with the new estimate of life learned from the gospels. It was not the genius of Burns that led him to write

A man's a man for a' that,

but the Christian spirit of the age, with its doctrine of equality that had filtered into all sorts of brains. Burns made lyric what he had heard in everyday talk at home in his childhood. Shakespeare had heard no such talk of the vital sort. Nobody talked it but the Puritans. Nobody who could write poetry, of all that brilliant company, said such things. The Puritans were preaching in grim prose the common value of men before God, but the Elizabethans were only dreaming of Utopias in some far-off islands of undiscovered seas. Dull men among these elder Puritans grasped the secret of the brotherhood of man in Christ. They did not make books but they made nations. The light of religious sympathy pierced recesses dark to the eyes of genius.

The companies of players who appeared at Stratford in the days of Shakespeare's boyhood, with blazoned banners and mock heroic grandeur, must have seized the imaginative lad for their own. His life was given to the theater. His plays were written to be acted only. He took the form and content of what lay at hand, the crude stock of plays owned by each theater, with no question or craving for originality in any way. Sonnets, tragedies, comedies, were all worked over from this old material. But when these musty chronicles and absurb plots and pasteboard heroes and villains once fell under his brooding spirit, were once illumined by that vast and glorious imagination, then the dry bones lived. They who confront us are the quick, with life athrob in their veins. He dealt with problems, madness, the ruin woman can bring, the weak man on the throne, the reflective soul cast into

the field of action, hate, and jealousy, and the hot and wayward passions of youth, but never the problems of poverty or freedom. When the age rushed to its climax the great Queen became sullen ; his powerful friends were driven to obscurity or sent to the block. Shakespeare turned to the tragedies. He dwelt upon the fall of earthly greatness, the sternness of justice, and the inexorable nature of fate. "A mirror for kings" is here indeed. Like Napoleon, he could put the crown on his own head and invest himself with kingly robes. "The fierce light that beats upon a throne" burned forth in his judicial and impartial arraignment, in the name of righteousness and conscience, of all knaves and weaklings in regal vesture. The broad and finely-balanced handling of great questions reveals the wide compass and ethical clearness of Shakespeare's mind. The strong man driven to bitter death may be seen at every curtain's fall, but the saving and uplifting of men is sadly wanting in those fixed and fate-bound pages. Remorse that conscience brings, the punishment of evildoers, he looks upon with sad, calm penetration that has made his pages one of the judgment seats for all humanity. But, lacking the spirtiual vision of Dante, he cannot transcend his age and, passing the

Bourne from which no traveler returns,

fix his gaze upon any White Rose of the Eternal. Without definite aim he sits apart,

Holding no creed, but contemplating all.

He stands at the day dawn of modern democracy, but his eyes behold no sunrise. He gazes at the masses of England, but neither brain nor heart gives any signs of either pity or hope. For him Fate has written over the doorway of every common man, "Abandon hope," and he knows not that a new decree has gone forth.

Franklin MElfech

ART. VI.-RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE THIRTIETH CENTURY

Is education worth while? Parents, interested in the real welfare of their children often question what is the good, after all, in their knowing a lot of things? More than one such, when his boy has come home from Harvard, or his girl from Wellesley, has put to himself that modern query, half whimsical, half awful, "What's the use?"

I do not write from an evangelical standpoint, having in mind the welfare of "souls" and the fitting thereof for "glory." I am thinking of life, life terrestrial, present, that may be rich and good, or bare and empty. And having this in mind I wonder if trigonometry furnishes the soul at all against world-weariness. And art, letters, science, philosophy, and travel-we are pretty well convinced that as "substitutes for life" these things are failures, and we are pondering whether as ministries to life they are sufficient. Culture ought to mean a thorough equipment for life. Does religion give this? It is safe to say, the conventional article, preached and practiced in most conventicles and performed in most cathedrals, does not. On the other hand, we are becoming more and more convinced that in some way the secret of that true culture which the world needs lies nowhere else than in Jesus of Nazareth. If his religion could be shaken free from the conventionalism which has monopolized it, could be taken simply as a program for a free and noble life, there would be something in it to give all men courage in their highest aims; produce in them aspiration rather than ambition; regulate their passions by making the noblest of them consume the more unworthy set them in livable relations to their fellows; hold them up to doing their best work; banish ennui, and diffuse a general gladness through all their days. Christianity must cease to be the football of contending denominations and become the common ground of civilized action. Now-a-days the subject is taboo in good society, because by "religion" we assume to mean a certain religious "party." We dare not teach it in schools for fear of clamoring sects. So also it is absent, as a motive, from

May we not hope that subject of dispute and

our best literature for the same reason. in time Christianity will cease to be a become the generally accepted basis of conduct and of life? It will percolate through the stratum of authority, and saturate psychology, experience, and common sense. Jesus will shine, as the world's teacher, by his own light, and not by men's candles on his altar. Now, I give Christianity another thousand years to accomplish this thorough enfranchisement, inwardly hoping it may be sooner. And at that time the fundamental place in our educational system will be reserved for the problem, "How to live," as indicated by the immutable principles of Jesus, and not "What to know," as formed in the shifting sand heaps of "facts" recorded in books.

When that time comes, what will be the rudiments of education as taught in all schools, public and otherwise?

1. The child will be taught, first of all, that which is the basic conception of Jesus's view of man, the intrinsic worth of a human being because of its divine nature. The divinity of mankind is the logical end of Jesus's doctrine. As divine, the child will learn, primarily, respect for himself, reliance upon his own intuitions, and courage to live his own life. The medieval extravagance of emphasis placed upon unselfishness will be rejected, and the healthy conscience will not allow love for others to prevent the normal development of one's own body, mind, and taste. For only as we are thus normally developed are we equipped to be of real service to our fellows. A visible, sane, and gentle self-respect is first of all.

2. Going on from sound self-esteem, the child will be then taught that, as a grand aim in life, a preference for the weal of others is higher than to make one's own welfare one's object of existence. For Epicureanism is psychologically insufficient as a basis of permanent joy. The world will learn, is learning, that Jesus was wiser and more far-seeing, and that a man holds secure lease upon contentment only in so far as he lives for others. To serve is greater than to be served. Love of self is basal, but inadequate; love of others, built on a right love for self, gives an orbital life.