Note 7 — Chapter III

Not long ago I happened to enter the Boys' Department of an urban Church School at about 9.15 a.m. The Headmaster was sitting at his desk, drawing up schemes of "secular" work. All the boys above "Standard III"—94 in number—were grouped together, listening, or pretending to listen, to a "chalk-and-talk" lecture on "Prayer" [of which there are apparently five varieties, viz., (1) Invocation, (2) Deprecation, (3) Obsecration, (4) Intercession, (5) Supplication]. The Headmaster explained to me that "of course it was only during the Scripture lesson" that this overgrouping went on. The lecture on Prayer was given by a young Assistant-master, whose naive delight in the long words that he rolled out ore rotundo and then chalked up on the blackboard, had blinded him to the obvious fact that he was making no impression whatever on his audience. The boys, one and all, reminded me forcibly of the "white-headed boy" in Dickens' village school, who displayed "in the expression of his face a remarkable capacity of totally abstracting his mind from the spelling on which his eyes were fixed."