“Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead’s most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.” Or Matthew Arnold’s lines on _Rugby Chapel_— “Servants of God!—or sons Shall I not call you? because Not as servants ye knew Your Father’s innermost mind, His, who unwillingly sees One of His little ones lost— Yours is the praise, if mankind Hath not as yet in its march Fainted, and fallen, and died!” Or this, again, of Tennyson— “Not once or twice in our fair island story The path of duty was the way to glory: He, that ever following her commands, On with toil of heart and knees and hands, Thro’ the long gorge to the far light, has won His path upward and prevail’d,— Shall find the toppling crags of duty, scaled, Are close upon the shining table-lands To which our God Himself is moon and sun.” Or Matthew Arnold’s _Morality_— How, “Tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.” Possibly we could hardly do better than lead children to reflect on some high poetic teaching, adding love to law and devotion to duty, so that children shall know themselves, by duty as by prayer, “Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.” In the matter of the ideas that inspire the virtuous life, we miss much by our way of taking things for granted. =Ethical Teaching of the Middle Ages.=—The mediæval Church preserved classical traditions. It endeavoured to answer the Socratic inquiry: “What ought we to do and what do we mean by the words ‘ought’ and ‘doing’ or ‘acting’?” and it answered, as far as might be by way of object-lessons, visible signs of spiritual things signified. In the Arena Chapel at Padua, we have Giotto’s Faith and Infidelity, Love and Envy, Charity and Avarice, Justice and Injustice, Temperance and Gluttony, Hope and Despair, pictured forth in unmistakable characters for the reading of the unlearned and ignorant. We have the same theme, treated with a difference, in what Mr Ruskin calls the ‘Bible of Amiens,’ where we may study Humility and Pride, Temperance and Gluttony, Chastity and Lust, Charity and Avarice, Hope and Despair, Faith and Idolatry, Perseverance and Atheism, Love and Discord, Obedience and Rebellion, Courage and Cowardice, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and Churlishness,—in pairs of quatrefoils, an upper and a lower, each under the feet of an Apostle, who was held to personify the special virtue. But _we_ know nothing about cardinal virtues and deadly sins.