82 M. J. KENDALi., ESQ., ON THE TEACHER^S VOCATION. 



I am thinking of those ideals, which, whatever his subjects 

 or status may be, guide and illuminate every teacher in his or 

 her vocation. The word itself — calhng or vocation — has an old- 

 world, half-ecclesiastical flavour, and, though Falstaff thought 

 it no sin to labour in a vocation of his own seeking and Mac- 

 aulay allows a moss-trooper to pursue a calling, I prefer to seek 

 my interpretation of the term in a beautiful sentence of Fuller's : 

 " Heaven is his vocation and therefore he counts earthly 

 employments avocations." Seeley, in his Natural Religion, 

 gives us a concise definition which exactly concurs with my own 

 view : Where there is the perception of an ideal, we may 

 expect to find the sense of a vocation." 



To put it roundly, no teacher deserves the title whose eyes 

 are so dimmed by questions of salary, status, tenure, etiquette 

 and curriculum, though all these matters are of importance, that 

 he cannot keep his eyes fixed on those special ideals upon which 

 his profession rests. It is interesting to find a champion of 

 working-men's education like Mr. Mansbridge strongly asserting 

 the principle of vocation or, as he by inference calls it, " ordina- 

 tion." " I believe," he says, " that God working through 

 Society does ordain men to specific work for the carrying out of 

 which He confers the necessary gifts and characteristics. Of 

 all the laws which govern the work of mankind the law of 

 diversity of gifts is at once the most obvious and the most ignored. 

 In a Society working in correspondence with the Divine law I 

 believe that there would arise a sufficient number of all kinds 

 of necessary workers — poets, musicians, navvies, woodworkers, 

 stoneworkers, farmers." One other sentence rounds off Mr. 

 Mansbridge's view : " The full and complete exercise of any 

 God-given capacity or characteristic is in itself worship and leads 

 to that fuller worship which is the highest conscious act of man." 



I am glad to recognise that navvies and stoneworkers have 

 their ordained profession in a State, and that their whole life 

 can become an act of worship, a claim, by the way, which Froude 

 makes for all his great EHzabethans, and especially for the 

 mariners : their life, he writes, was " one great liturgy." But, 

 no doubt, if Mr. Mansbridge or anyone else were to draw up a 

 hierarchy of the professions, that of the teacher would stand 

 near the top, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, 

 swayed this way and that by his vocation and his avocations. 



If there is any truth — and I believe there is much — in this 

 theory of special aptitudes and affinities for special vocations, we 



