No one can do this but a father. No one can understand his son like a father and know what it is necessary for him to learn; to no one will the son listen, or confide in, as his father. But nowadays I notice that fathers have abdicated. They consider their duty fulfilled if they pay for the boy's schooling, and everything is left to the schoolmaster. Many fathers that I know are quite stranger to their sons. Mothers, on the contrary, strive more and more to obtain influence over their sons and bring them up in the principles of women. But a man must be a man or be nothing. There is another and very considerable difference between schools now and the schools of sixty years ago and before. In the earlier period the schoolmasters were rarely clergymen; now they are practically always so; and not only that, but boys nowadays are far more under control and influence of their masters than they were. Now whatever good points may be claimed for Church teaching by those who believe in it, there will, I think, be no difficulty about the admission that the frame of mind, the outlook on the world, of ecclesiastics is not suitable for men who have to lead an active life. It is, in fact, the very reverse of what a man requires whose first duty it is to understand the world and to lead the world. For to the ecclesiastic the world is a bad place, it has to be borne as best it can, to be condemned not understood, and all effort is directed not to this world but to some other. Moreover, the habit of thought of ecclesiastics is fixed. They believe that not only is truth absolute, but that they possess it or some of it; the very foundation-rock of their belief is authority, and freedom of thought is disliked by them as subversive of their tenets. Their principal qualities are those of submission, patience and obedience, not merely in act but in thought. Now boys are apt to imitate their masters, and however secular a course of education may be, if it be given by ecclesiastics the boys are certain to be a great deal influenced by their master's outlook on life. That accounts for much of the pessimism that is observable, for the "unnatural mildness" of the modern young man. If you keep a boy under ecclesiastical habits of thought till he is twenty-three, how can he ever escape into the fresh air of free inquiry? How will he ever love the world instead of despising it? And no good work was ever done except by men who loved the world; and love comes from understanding, not from aloofness.