And in particular let me appeal to you, the inhabitants of Bath, to be proud of this school, to foster it, to assist it in every way, and be assured that in so doing you are conferring a lasting benefit on your famous city.>
[2] An Address delivered at the High School, Bath, and the High School, Clifton, Dec. 1889.
III.
RELIGION.[3]
I am not going to preach you a sermon of quite the usual type, but intend rather to offer a few detached remarks without attempting to weave them into any unity of plan, or to connect them with any particular text from the Bible. Such unity as these remarks may possess will result not from design but from the nature of the subject. For I am going to speak about religion.
Now as I write this word I almost fancy I hear the rustle of an audience composing itself to endure what it foresees must be a dull and uninteresting address. "Religion! he can't make that interesting." Now, why is this? What is religion, that in the eyes of so many clever and intelligent and well-educated young people it should be thought dull?
Of this one point I am quite sure, that it is the fault of our misunderstanding and misrepresentation, in the past and the present, that religion seems dull.
Religion is, in its essence, the opening to the young mind of all the higher regions of thought and aspiration and imagination and spirituality. When you are quite young you are occupied of course with the visible things and people round you; each hour brings its amusements, its occupations and its delights, and reflection scarcely begins. But soon questions of right and wrong spring up; a world of ideas and imaginations opens before you; you are led by your teachers and your books into the presence of great thoughts, the inspirations that come from beauty in all forms, from nature, from art, from literature, and especially from poets; you come under the influence of friends—fathers, mothers, or other elders—who evidently have springs of conduct and aspirations you as yet only dimly recognize; and mixed with all these influences there is that influence on us from childhood upward of our prayers that we have been taught, our religious services, our Bibles, and most of all the Sacred Figure, dimly seen, but never long absent from our thoughts, enveloped in a sort of sacred and mysterious halo—the figure of our Lord Jesus Christ enshrined in our hearts, and that Father in Heaven of Whom He spoke. All these are among the religious influences; and what is their aim and object? What is it that we should try and extract from them for ourselves? How should we use them in our turn to better those who come after us?