Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/248

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THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS

view. Some of them are nurseries of a vice which, unless it be discontinued when the youth goes out into the world, may bring on him one of the most degrading sentences of our penal law. The clerical method of character-training—one admits, of course, great occasional personalities—has little influence on these things. Public-school boys, and especially young men at our universities, know that every syllable which the preacher addresses to them is disputed, and no other ground of right and healthy conduct is, as a rule, impressed on them. Many will know that the grossest opinion of the clergy themselves is current in our public schools and older universities, and is embodied in numbers of scurrilous stories. The position of the clergyman in our educational world is false. He is there for the same reason that the Bible is in the elementary school: in the interest of the Churches. We have improved mental education enormously since it ceased to be a monopoly of the clergy. Possibly we will make a similar improvement in character-training; we can hardly do it with less success than they have done.