We are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its value. Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange places. It would pause over some spot in the world--some room or field that I had seen, however casually, in former years--and would refuse to move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest. Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious assistance from the scene. The places were always empty--never a person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country roadside--a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow beyond--which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence--for there was no question that life streamed out of it to me. Under these circumstances it was natural enough that I should sometimes have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed, during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere; immense power.