230 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
social values. In the twentieth century, Fra Angelico may be for us only 
an item in a museum of dead junk, much as a modern housewife hangs 
a Tudor warming pan above her electric refrigerator—unless the vision 
of life that inspired Fra Angelico continues to have a value which can 
supplement or intensify the values determining the pattern of the life 
that we are making with the help of wireless telephony, the songs of 
Shakespeare or any other material or instrument that seems appropriate. 
The thin, starved, anemic and retarding life, whether of to-day or oi the 
age of Tut-an-Khamen or of Siegfried and Brunhild, is the life where 
purposive man let the scale of values shrivel and, in consequence, the 
aptitudes that might have flowered withered up, and human appetites were 
degraded to a limited and purely carnal satisfaction; the fat, well- 
nourished, rich and expanding life of any epoch has always been when 
purposive man let the scale of values soar and measured an illimitable 
horizon, not by what mind co-opezating with body had done or were 
doing, but what they could do if each of the two could be trained by an 
appropriate technique completely to work together for a unified end— 
above all, when he became intoxicated by the profoundest of all truths 
that the spiritual and the material are not in the nature of things 
antagonists, but allies. 
To-day, a social revolution, largely due to the educational progress of 
the last hundred years, is steadily regrading and reshaping the whole 
Commonwealth that we call the British Empire. Education has extended 
the scale of social values, and increasingly intensified in millions of new 
recruits the power to devise and the desire to will the means to action. 
But the aid that our educational system can increasingly give to this 
complicated social and economic transformation is being limited because 
we have refused to solve the fundamental problem of religious in- 
struction, and to allocate to institutional religion its harmonious place 
in the task of training for life. Until we have done that, no matter 
how scientifically planned may be our educational machinery, or how 
loyally it may be worked, there will be a steady flow of grit clogging 
the gears and causing all the bearings to run red-hot. This is not 
the place, nor am I the person, to indicate how and where the true 
solution can be found ; but if it be the supreme function of education to 
see life as a whole and to train every boy and girl, according to their 
powers and aptitudes, to a maximum of vision and of a willing reason, so 
that they can ultimately achieve their truest happiness and their highest 
efficiency in the new social order, based on the correct allocation of 
differentiated function, it is my unshakeable conviction that the funda- 
mental place of religion in life must be regarded as an essential pre- ~ 
liminary to any further educational advance. 
A hundred years hence, Section L may be meeting in London to 
celebrate a second Centenary of the British Association. Whatever else 
the President may have to say on that occasion, I trust that he will be 
able to record this as a mortgage inherited from 1931 and paid off to make 
a triumphant overture to another century of success. 
Oe 
