We are just beginning as educators to pay ordered attention to that fringe-world in which sense, intellect, and spirit all have a part: I mean the world of æsthetic apprehension. It cannot be denied that the result has been, for many of the young people now growing up, an immense enlargement and enrichment of life. Look at one of the most striking intellectual characteristics of the last few years: the rapid growth of the taste and need for poetry, the amount of it that is written, the way in which it seems to supply a necessary outlet for young Englishmen in the present day. Look at the mass of verse which was composed, under conditions of utmost horror, on the battlefields; poetry the most pathetic in the world, in which we see the passionate effort of spirit to find adjustment, its assertion of unconquerable power, even in the teeth of this overwhelming manifestation of brute force. There is the power of the future: the spirit of beauty and truth seeking for utterance. There is that quickening spring, bubbling up afresh in every generation; and ready, if we will help it to find expression, to transfigure our human life. There is a common idea that the spiritual life means something pious and mawkish: not very desirable in girls, and most objectionable in boys. It is strange that this notion, which both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures so emphatically contradict, should ever have grown up amongst us. The spirit, says St. Paul, is not a spirit of fearfulness; it is “a spirit of Power and Love and Discipline”—qualities that make for vigour and manliness of the best type. It is the very source of our energies, both natural and supernatural. The mystics sometimes called it our “life-giving life,” and modern psychologists are beginning to discover that it is, in the most literal sense, our “health’s eternal spring.” People say, “Come, Holy Spirit”; as if it were something foreign to us: yet it comes perpetually in every baby born into the world, for each new human life entering the temporal order implies a new influx or, least, a new manifestation of spirit. But, when spirit is thus wedded to mind and body to form human nature, it is submitted to the law governing human nature: the law of freedom. It is ours, to develop or stunt as we please. Its mighty powers are not pressed on an unwilling race, but given us in germ to deal with as we will. Parents are responsible for giving it every opportunity of development, the food, the light, the nurture that all growing things require—in fact, for its education: a great honour, and a great responsibility.