We have spoken of the Angels who preside over these terraces, engaged in the apparently superfluous task of controlling those whose will is bent manfully upon the task before them, lifted as they are for ever above the zone where temptation has any power.[213] What a task, we are inclined to say, for angelic faculties! What a sinecure! Yet the resemblance to the human “Guardian Angel” of the Montessori school is surely too striking to be without significance: and modern educational principles of which the Dottoressa is by no means the exclusive exponent, may help us to realise how—in this as in so many other things—we shall do well to range ourselves “on the side of the Angels.” The Montessori teacher—may we not say the truly modern teacher of whatever type?—submits to an arduous and exacting course of training—far more arduous and exacting than that which “qualified” previous generations of teachers ... and all for—what? To know what _not_ to do, what _not_ to say; to be able to practise at the right moment a fully qualified self-restraint, and so allow free scope to the inner forces of expansion in the pupil’s personality: an expansion which too heavy a hand, however lovingly laid upon the growing life, might crush or stunt or warp! A constant presence, inspiring but unobtrusive; realised but not dominant or over-insistent; not obviating or unduly curtailing those movements and processes which in education are infinitely more valuable than immediate results ... yet ever at hand when really needed.... Is not this a _rôle_ worthy of angelic power and dignity? Is it not precisely the traditional _rôle_ of the Guardian Angel in whose beneficent existence some of us are still childlike enough to believe? Surely they were not mere figureheads, those “Birds of God,” whose stately grace and beauty Dante delights to portray? Even so is it with the “Guardian Angels” of the Montessori school—with the restrained efficiency and enthusiasm and the carefully calculated use of personal influence of the best teachers of all types and grades: their dignity and essentially angelic quality is apt to be in proportion to their unobtrusiveness. Education is, after all, not “forcible feeding” or “cramming”; its office is to educe—to draw forth. In Socrates’ homely phrase it is a midwife. “Sairey Gamp” was certainly not an angel; but there are those of her craft who are. More and more this _maieutic_ office of the Teacher is realised, and with its realisation Teachers grow less and less like the castigating demons of Inferno—more and more angelic. Omai vedrai di sì fatti ufficiali.[214]