Now this is a very great and novel idea, the idea of a modern temple set like a miner's lantern in the forefront of school or college to light its task in the world. It rounds off and completes Sanderson's vision of a modern school; it is logically essential to that vision. But meanwhile what was happening to the school-chapel¹ project?  
For, after all, in the older type of school, the chapel with its matins and evensong, its Onward² Christian³ Soldiers and suchlike stirring hymns⁴, its confirmations⁵ and first communions, was in a rather dreamy, formless mechanical way undertaking⁶ to do precisely⁷ what the new House of Vision was also to do, that is, to give a direction to the whole subsequent life. But was it the same direction? The normal school-chapel points up—not very effectively one feels; the House of Vision was to point onward. Sanderson had a crowded, capacious mind, but sooner or later the question behind these two discrepant⁸ objectives, whether men are to live for heaven or for creation, was bound to have come to an issue.
 
His mental process was at first syncretic. He began to think of a school-chapel, not as a place[Pg 140] for formal services but as a place of meditation⁹ and resolve. He began to speak of the chapel also as though it was to be 'the tent on the mount,' the place of vision. He betrayed a growing hostility¹⁰ to the intoned prayers, the trite¹¹ responses, the tuneful empty hymns, the Anglican vacuity¹² of the normal chapel procedure. Had he lived to guide the building of Oundle chapel I believe it would have diverged¹³ more and more from any precedent¹⁴, more and more in the direction of that House of Vision, that the premature¹⁵ and insufficient¹⁶ Eric Yarrow building had so pitifully failed to realise.
 
Here is evidence of that divergence¹⁷ in a passage from a sermon preached after a gathering¹⁸ of parents and old boys in the Court Room at the London Grocers' Hall to discuss the chapel project. I ask any one trained in the s............