Page:The Education of the Conscience.djvu/14

10 them "whom we have seen" we learn to love "God whom we have not seen ," but in whom is perfect all that even in the midst of human imperfection moves us so deeply and wins us so tenderly.

And so our question has found, I trust, its answer. The Christian teaching, the religious life, of your school, is not something taken out of, or added on to, your education. They contribute a necessary and a magnificent part of it: that which satisfies and strengthens your conscience, that which satisfies and purifies your heart. They carry on the grammar of the first lessons of right and wrong which you had in the days of childhood, and work them out into a true science of goodness, whereby goodness in us is understood in its true light as the glad and free homage and the loving imitation, which a glorious and perfect God, a holy and loving Father, asks and receives from His children.

How differently will those who have profited by such education go forth into life: how far more proof against temptation than those who see nothing in goodness but what is a fortunate habit, or a way in their family, or a custom of good society, or an irksome and unintelligible law: with how much keener and burning a purity: how much more ready and eager to bear a part, and lend a hand, in the cause of goodness, on the side of right, as the cause of God and the side of Christ: with how much happier and deeper an understanding of the real meaning of our short and changeful life on earth: with how much surer a sense that this whole life is itself only an education for an immortal being, and that our fullest and highest lessons in goodness here are