do--some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the special gifts of its pupils--of trying by scholarships, by Care Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path on which they are best fitted to travel. In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry out the principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on education--Plato's _Republic_. Plato's object was to train every citizen to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature--and who can be an educational thinker without having faith in human nature?--to be convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70] this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work is a far greater thing towards the development of the God that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work as will have its reward _in the doing_.