Here, then, we have a very practical question for our consideration and answering. "Is there anything in my life"--so the question comes to us in our self-examination--"which could be so described? any influence, spreading from my conduct, of which men might truly say that it also is helping to debase the moral currency? Is there to be seen in it anything that tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of things sacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things of life?" And if we are in any doubt how to put these questions in a concrete and practical shape, we have only to remember how any one who helps to lower any standard of taste or conduct is debasing the moral currency of life; how, for instance, all those are debasing it who substitute any wrong notion of honour for right notions of honour, or who put roughness and coarseness in place of manliness, or who set the fashion of cynical judgments on good and bad characters. Or we might take an illustration from what is, unhappily, a very common element in English life: the habit of gambling sport. Wherever this habit spreads, in any class of society, from the highest to the lowest, its effect is invariable; it undermines integrity, it hardens the heart and debases taste, and is the willing handmaid of other vices. Moral degradation is its inseparable companion. Therefore, if you mix in it, or share in it, or give any adhesion or countenance to it, which helps, as men say, to make it respectable, and so to spread its influence, you are debasing the moral currency. Or take another common case. You are familiar with the poet's description, "And thus he bore without abuse the grand old name of gentleman." That is a noble thing for any man or boy to have said of him; and there is not one among you who does not desire always to be able to claim that name as his own. But, wherever we go in the world, how many men there are who claim it and yet debase it by ignoble use! They help to spread the notion that a man may be a man of low morality and still a gentleman; that his gentlemanliness may be a mere varnish of culture and manners, a thin veneering having underneath it only meanness, or coarseness, or corruption; and that, notwithstanding this, he may still claim to be called a gentleman. Those who spread such doctrines are debasing the moral currency of English life. And it should be the mission of schools like this, and of those who grow up in them, to pour upon all such persons the contempt which they deserve, and to restore the currency of common life to something of Christian purity. Remembering, then, how sensitive the soul is, and how easily by example, or conduct, or fashion it may be so perverted as to lose its clear vision and higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to make it our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free from such debasement.