Baseball, our most popular and distinctively national game, constitutes a fair field for this inquiry. In order to evaluate this form of play as an agency in moral training it is necessary to presume that one has a company of nine or more boys grouped together on the basis of loyalty to a common neighborhood, school, club, church, or the like. They elect a manager who acts for the team in arranging a schedule of games with their various rivals and who serves in general as their business agent; also a captain, usually chosen because of his ability to play the game and his quality of natural leadership. He directs his players in their contests and in case of dispute speaks for his team.

The boys should also have in every case a trainer older than themselves, a player of well-known ability and exemplary character. It is usually through neglect of supervision of this sort that the ethical value of baseball for boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age is forfeited. Without the trainer to direct their practice games, and as a recognized expert to try out the players for the various positions, the possibilities of forming a team are few and those of unjust and harmful conduct many.

If at the outset, the group, coming together in park or vacant lot, cannot speedily agree upon a modus operandi, their energy is turned into profane disputing about the chief positions, and usually a game cannot be organized, or, if it is, lack of agreement as to put-outs, runs, fouls, and debatable points soon ruins the attempt, with little left to most of the boys except resentment of the might-makes-right policy. On the other hand, whether one has in mind a team or a chance group of players, the presence of a capable adult as an immediate and final court of appeal guarantees fair play for all, prevents personal animosities, and inspires each one to do his best in the presence of a competent judge.

Wherever the team with proper supervision is a possibility the moral value of the game will be at its maximum. Uniforms are not to be despised. Loyalty to the school represented is but boyhood's form of what in later life becomes ability to espouse a cause and to assume a degree of social responsibility in keeping with that attitude.

Because of this loyalty the boy who expected to play in the prominent position of pitcher takes his less conspicuous place in right field, if by fair trials under the trainer another boy has demonstrated his superior fitness to fill the much-coveted position. For the credit of the community or school which he has the honor to represent, the match game must be won; hence he surrenders his personal glory to the common good. He does more. Under the excitement of the contest and with the consequent strengthening of the team spirit, he encourages the very boy, who would otherwise have been only his personal rival, to do his level best, forgetting utterly any mean individual comparisons and all anti-social self-consciousness, in what he has enthusiastically accepted as the greater common good.

He goes to bat at a critical juncture in the game. The score is close. He as much as anyone would like to have runs to his credit. But for the sake of the team his chief concern must be to advance the base runner. So he plays carefully rather than spectacularly, and makes a bunt or a sacrifice hit, with the practical certainty that he will be put out at first base, but with a good probability that he will thus have advanced his fellow one base and so have contributed to the team's success.

The religious value of the principle here involved receives no little attention in sermon and Sunday-school class, but how tame and formal is its verbal presentation as compared with its registration in the very will and muscles of a boy at play! Wherever a state has become great or a cause victorious, wherever a hero—a Socrates or a Christ—has appeared among men, there has been the willingness, when necessary, to make the "sacrifice hit." The loyalty that has held itself ready so to serve on moral demand has to its credit all the higher attainments of humanity.

In the great American experiment of democracy, where the welfare of the people is so often bartered for gold, and where public office is frequently prostituted to private gain, there is a proportionately great need of teaching in every possible way this fundamental virtue of loyalty. Our future will be secure only in the degree in which intelligent and strong men are devoted to the welfare of city and state after the fashion of the boy to his team. It is because war, with all its horrors, has stimulated and exhibited this virtue that its glory persists far into our industrial age; and the hope of a lofty patriotism, that shall be equal to the enervating influences of peace, lies in an educated and self-denying type of loyalty.

The use of this loyalty in the reformation of boy criminals has been remarkably demonstrated in the well-known work of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, of Denver. In a particularly difficult case he says:

I decided to put my influence over him to the test. I told him of the fight I was making for him, showed him how I had been spending all my spare time "trying to straighten things out" for him and Heimel, and warned him that the police did not believe I could succeed. "Now, Lee," I said, "you can run away if you want to, and prove me a liar to the cops. But I want to help you and I want you to stand by me. I want you to trust me, and I want you to go back to the jail there, and let me do the best I can." He went, and he went alone—unguarded.

Here is a striking example of the team work of two with the play upon loyalty and the spirit of contest.

Another lesson about boys I learned from little "Mickey" when I was investigating his charge that the jailer had beaten him. The jailer said: "Some o' those kids broke a window in there, and when I asked Mickey who it was, he said he didn't know. Of course he knew. D'yu think I'm goin' to have kids lie to me?" A police commissioner who was present turned to Mickey. "Mickey," he said, "why did you lie?" Mickey faced us in his rags. "Say," he asked, "Do yoh t'ink a fullah ought to snitch on a kid?" And the way he asked made me ashamed of myself. Here was a quality of loyalty that we should be fostering in him instead of trying to crush out of him. It was the beginning in the boy of that feeling of responsibility to his fellows on which society is founded. Thereafter,

no child brought before our court was ever urged to turn state's evidence against his partners in crime—much less rewarded for doing so or punished for refusing. Each was encouraged to "snitch" on himself, and himself only.

Another interview with a boy under sentence to the industrial school emphasizes the same point:

"I can help you, Harry," I said. "But you've got to carry yourself. If I let boys go when they do bad things, I'll lose my job. The people 'll get another judge in my place to punish boys, if I don't do it. I can't let you go." We went over it and over it; and at last I thought I had him feeling more resigned and cheerful, and I got up to leave him. But when I turned to the door he fell on his knees before me and, stretching out his little arms to me, his face distorted with tears, he cried: "Judge! Judge! If you let me go, I'll never get you into trouble again!"

I had him! It was the voice of loyalty.... This time he "stuck." "Judge," the mother told me long afterward, "I asked Harry the other day, how it was he was so good for you, when he wouldn't do it for me or the policeman. And he says: 'Well, Maw, you see if I gets bad ag'in the Judge he'll lose his job. I've got to stay with him, 'cause he stayed with me.'" I have used that appeal to loyalty hundreds of times since in our work with the boys, and it is almost infallibly successful.

In eight years, out of 507 cases of boys put upon their honor to take themselves from Denver to the Industrial School at Golden, to which the court had sentenced them, Judge Lindsey had but five failures. In view of such facts, who will think for a moment that we have so much as begun to turn the latent loyalty of boyhood to its highest ethical use?

No doubt much can be said against football, which ranks second in popularity among American athletic games. For some years the elements of hazard and rough treatment have been unhappily too prominent, so that the suspicion is warranted that players have been sacrificed to the bloodthirsty demands of the vast throng of spectators. The tension of playing in the presence of thousands of partisan enthusiasts shows itself in a reckless disregard of physical injury. Furthermore, for boys in early adolescence the tax upon the heart constitutes a common danger which is often rendered more serious by the untrained condition of the players. It is to be hoped that in the further modification of the rules from year to year, the players and their welfare will be kept more in mind and the sensation-loving public, whose gate-fees have been too big a consideration, will be measurably overlooked.

But with this concession, all of the virtue that attaches to baseball will be found in football, only in accentuated form. Physical bravery is, of course, more emphasized; while team loyalty, with all that it implies, is more intense. The relation of the members to one another in a well-organized team amounts to an affection which is never forgotten. The words of cheer when the team is hard pushed and has to take a "brace"; the fighting spirit that plays the game to a finish, no matter what the odds; the hand extended to help to his feet the man who has just advanced the ball; the pat on the back; the impulsive embrace; the very tears shed in common after a lost game—all of this is a social and moral experience of no small value. Basketball also offers a good field for the subordination of personal glory to team success and, in point of intensity, stands midway between baseball and football with the elimination of the dangerous qualities of the latter.



Games of this sort are also the most effective means of developing, through expression, the boy's sense of justice or fair play. And this sentiment will always be found strong and operative in him unless it has been overcome by the passion to win or by imitation of the bad example of certain debased athletes, popularly known as "muckers." Under proper leadership, the boy soon learns that the true spirit of manly sport is the farthest removed from that of the footpad and the blackguard. Appreciation of successful opponents and consideration for the vanquished can be made effectually to supplant the cheap, blatant spirit which seeks to attribute one's defeat to trickery and chance and uses one's victory as an occasion for bemeaning the vanquished. The presence of a capable director of play is sure to eliminate this evil which has crept in under the sanction of vicious ideals and through gross neglect of boys' play on the part of adults in general and educators in particular. The Decalogue itself cannot compete with a properly directed game in enforcing the fair-play principle among boys. It is worth something to read about fair play, but it is worth much more to practice it in what is, for the time being, a primary and absorbing interest.

A large part of the morality which is most obviously desirable for human welfare consists in bringing the body into habitual obedience to the will. The amount of individual suffering and of loss and expense to society due to failure in this struggle is nothing less than appalling. The victims of emotional hurricanes, "brainstorms," neurotic excess, and intemperate desire are legion. A nation that is overfed, under-exercised, and notably neurasthenic should neglect nothing that makes for prompt and reliable self-control. Lycurgus said, "The citizens of Sparta must be her walls," and in building up a defense for the modern state against forces more disastrous than Persian armies we must turn to the ancient device of the playground and athletic games.

The moral value of play in this respect arises from the instant muscular response to volition. Delay, half-hearted response, inattention, preoccupation, whimsicalness, carelessness, and every sluggish performance of the order of the will, disqualifies the player so that when we take into account the adolescent passion to excel, and the fact that 80 per cent of the games of this period are characterized by intense physical activity, we are forced to place the highest valuation on play as a moral educator; for this enthronement of the will over the body, although having to do with affairs of no permanent importance, has great and abiding value for every future transaction in life.

Indeed, the physical competency attained in athletic games has its reaction upon every mental condition. Many boys who are hampered by unreasonable diffidence, a lack of normal self-confidence and self-assertion, find unexpected ability and positiveness through this avenue alone and, on the other hand, the physical test and encounter of the game serves to bring a proper self-rating to the overconfident.

Dr. George J. Fisher, international secretary of the Physical Department of the Young Men's Christian Association, says, "An unfortunately large number of our population haven't the physical basis for being good." No one with even the slightest knowledge of sociology and criminology will be disposed to deny such a statement. One might as well expect a one-legged man to win the international Marathon as to expect certain physical delinquents to "go right." Thousands of boys and girls sit in our public schools today who are the unhappy candidates for this delinquency, and we are monotonously striving to get something into their minds, which would largely take care of their own development, if only we had the wisdom to address ourselves to their bodies.

There is indeed not only a physical basis of being good, but, what is not less important, a physical basis of doing good. Many people avoid blame and disgrace who fail utterly in making a positive contribution to the welfare of the community. They do not market their mental goods. Thousands of men remain in mediocrity, to the great loss of society, simply because they have not the requisite physical outfit to force their good ideas, impulses, and visions into the current of the world's life. For the most part they lack the great play qualities, "enthusiasm, spontaneity, creative ability, and the ability to co-operate." Whenever we build up a strong human organism we lay the physical foundations of efficiency, and one is inclined to go farther and think with Dr. Fisher, that muscular energy itself is capable of transformation into energy of mind and will. That is to say that play not only helps greatly in building the necessary vehicle, but that it creates a fund upon which the owner may draw for the accomplishment of every task.

There is ground also for the contention that grace of physical development easily passes over into manner and mind. The proper development of the instrument, the right adjustment and co-ordination of the muscular outfit through which the emotions assemble and diffuse themselves, is, when other things are equal, a guaranty of inner beauty and the grace of true gentility. A poor instrument is always vexatious, a good instrument is an abiding joy. The good body helps to make the gracious self. Other things being equal the strong body obeys, but the weak body rules.

One should not overlook the heartiness that is engendered in games, the total engagement of mind and body that insures for the future the ability "to be a whole man to one thing at a time." Much of the moral confusion of life arises from divided personality, and the miserable application of something less than the entire self to the problem in hand. Do not the great religious leaders of the world agree with the men of practical efficiency in demonstrating and requiring this hearty release of the total self in the proposed line of action? The demand of Jesus, touching love of God and neighbor, or regarding enlistment in His cause, is a demand for prompt action of the total self. Possibly no other single virtue has a more varied field of application than the ability for decisive and whole-souled action, which is constantly cultivated in all physical training, and especially in competitive athletic games.

It should be noted also that the hearty release of energy is, in every good game, required to keep within the rules. This is particularly true in basket-ball, which takes high rank as an indoor game for boys. While the game is intense and fatiguing, anything like a muscular rampage brings certain penalty to the player and loss to his team. So that, while the boy who does not play "snappy" and hard cannot rank high, neither can the boy who plays "rough-house." Forcefulness under control is the desideratum.

Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency. In the midst of all the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips Brooks exclaim, "It's great fun to be a minister." An epoch-making president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor, with all the zest of a boy at play, "We've beaten them to a frazzle"; and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and imprisonment, calls out to his followers, "I have fought a good fight." "It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it."

The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated. This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous tensions and reflexes from sex conditions and not infrequently passes over into sex abuse or excess of some sort. So that the diversion of strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable moral prophylactic. Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the intense and suggestive stimuli of city life, call for a large measure of this wholesome treatment for the preservation of the moral integrity of the boy, his proper self-respect, and those ideals of physical development which will surely make all forms of self-abuse or indulgence far less likely.

The normal exhilaration of athletic games, which cannot be described to those without experience, is often what is blindly and injuriously sought by the young cigarette smoker in the realm of nervous excitation without the proper motor accompaniments. Possibly if we had not so restricted our school-yards and overlooked the necessity for a physical trainer and organized play, we would not have schools in which as many as 80 per cent of the boys between ten and seventeen years of age are addicted to cigarettes. In trying to fool Nature in this way the boy pays a heavy penalty in the loss of that very decisiveness, force, and ability in mind and body which properly accompany athletic recreation. The increased circulation and oxidization of the blood is in itself a great tonic and when one reflects that, with a running pace of six miles an hour the inhalation of air increases from four hundred and eighty cubic inches per minute to three thousand three hundred and sixty cubic inches, the tonic effect of the athletic game will be better appreciated. This increased use of oxygen means healthy stimulation, growth of lung capacity, and exaltation of spirit without enervation. "Health comes in through the muscles but flies out through the nerves."

It was well thought and arranged by the ancients [says Martin Luther] that young people should exercise themselves and have something creditable and useful to do. Therefore I like these two exercises and amusements best, namely, music and chivalrous games or bodily exercises, as fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, and others..... With such bodily exercises one does not fall into carousing, gambling, and hard drinking, and other kinds of lawlessness, as are unfortunately seen now in the towns and at the courts. This evil comes to pass if such honest exercises and chivalrous games are despised and neglected.



The feeling of harmony and bien-etre resulting from play is, in itself, a rare form of wealth for the individual and a blessing to all with whom one has to do. Every social contact tends to become wholesome. And who will say that the virtue of cheerfulness is not one of the most delightful and welcome forms of philanthropy? Play, rightly directed, always has this result.

Possibly no social work in America is more sanely constructive than that of the playground movement. In the few years of its existence it has made ample proof of its worth in humane and beneficent results; and our city governments are hastening to acknowledge—what has been too long ignored—the right of every child to play. It is only to be regretted that the play movement has not centered about our public schools for it constitutes a legitimate part of education. The survivors who reach high school and college receive relatively a good deal of attention in physical training and organized play, but the little fellows of the elementary grades who have curvatures, retardation, adenoids, and small defects which cause loss of grade, truancy, and delinquency receive as yet very meager attention.

In dearth of opportunity and in cruel oversight of the normal play-needs of boyhood, there probably has never been anything equal to our modern American city. But the cost of industrial usurpation in restricting the time and area of play is beginning to be realized; and the relation of the play-time and of the playground to health, happiness, morality, and later to industrial efficiency, begins to dawn upon our civic leaders. If "recreation is stronger than vice," it becomes the duty of religious and educational institutions to contribute directly and indirectly to normal recreative needs.

But what can the minister do? He can help educate the church out of a negative or indifferent attitude toward the absorbing play-interests of childhood and youth. He can publicly endorse and encourage movements to provide for this interest of young life and may often co-operate in the organization and management of such movements. Every church should strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and power to such work and should receive through the same channels first-hand information of this form of constructive and preventive philanthropy. He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies organized in connection with his own church. He can plead for a real and longer childhood in behalf of Christ's little ones who are often sacrificed through commercial greed, un-Christian business ambition, educational blindness, and ignorance. He can preach a gospel that does not set the body over against the soul, science over against the Bible, and the church over against normal life; but embraces every child of man in an imperial redemption which is environmental and social as well as individual, physical as well as spiritual. In short, he can study and serve his community, not as one who must keep an organization alive at whatever cost, but as one who must inspire and lead others to obey the Master whose only reply to our repeated protestations of love is, "Feed my lambs."



CHAPTER VI

THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]

It is practically impossible to overemphasize the importance of the boy's vocational choice. Next to his attitude toward his Maker and his subsequent choice of a life partner this decision controls his worth and destiny. For it is not to be supposed that play with all its virtue, its nourish and exercise of nascent powers, and its happy emancipation into broader and richer living can adequately motivate and permanently ennoble the energies of youth. Until some vocational interest dawns, education is received rather than sought and will-power is latent or but intermittently exercised. Play has a great orbit, but every true parent and educator seeks to know the axis of a given life.

For some boys presumably of high-school age and over, this problem becomes real and engrossing, but for the vast majority there is little intelligent choice, no wise counsel, no conscious fronting of the profoundly religious question of how to invest one's life. The children of ease graduate but slowly, if at all, from the "good-time" ideal, while the children of want are ordinarily without option in the choice of work. But for all who, being permitted and helped, both seek and find then-proper places in the ranks of labor, life becomes constructively social and therefore self-respecting. To be able to do some bit of the world's work well and to dedicate one's self to the task is the individual right of every normal youth and the sure pledge of social solvency. Ideally an art interest in work for its own sake should cover the whole field of human labor, and in proportion as each person finds a task suited to his natural ability and is well trained for that task does he lift himself from the grade of a menial or a pauper and enter into conscious and worthy citizenship.

Here then, as in the case of the mating instinct, the vocational quest rightly handled forces the ego by its very inclination and success into the altruism of a social order. For it is the misfits, the vocationally dormant, the defeated, and those who, however successful, have not considered such choice as an ethical concern of religion that make up the anti-social classes of the present time.

Hence this problem of vocational guidance which is so agitating the educational world comes home to the minister in his work with youth. It may be that he shall find new and practical use for the maligned doctrine of election and that he shall place under intelligent, and heavenly commission the ideals and hopes of later adolescence. At any rate where the life career hinges, there the religious expert should be on hand. For what profit is there in society's vast investment in early and compulsory education if at the crucial time of initial experiment in the world's work there be neither high resolve nor intelligent direction nor sympathetic coaching into efficiency?

But the importance of vocational choice does not turn upon the doubtful supposition that there is one and only one suitable task for a given youth. Probably there are groups or families of activities within which the constructive endeavor may have happy and progressive expression. Nor, from the minister's point of view, is the economic aspect of the problem paramount. It is true that an investment of $50,000 worth of working ability deserves study and wise placing and it is true that the sanction of public education is to return to the state a socially solvent citizen who will contribute to the common welfare and will more than pay his way; but the immediately religious importance of this commanding interest consists in the honest and voluntary request for counsel on the part of the youth himself.

Fortunately in the very midst of a reticent and often skeptical period there comes, through the awakened vocational interest, an inlet into the soul of youth. No religious inquisitor or evangelistic brigand could have forced an entrance, but lo, all at once the doors are opened from within and examination is invited. It is invited because the boy wishes to know what manner of person he is and for what pursuit he is or may be fitted. When once this issue is on and one is honored as counselor and friend, the moral honesty and eagerness of youth, the thoroughgoing confession on all the personal and moral phases of the problem in hand are enough to move and humble the heart of any pastor. Such conference solemnizes and reassures the worker with boys, while to have spent no time as an invited and reverent guest within this sacred precinct is to fail of a priesthood that is profoundly beautiful.

Several experiences with both individuals and groups are fresh in mind at this writing. On one occasion a guild of working boys in later adolescence were living together in a church fraternity house, and it was their custom on one evening of each week to have some prominent man as guest at dinner and to hear an informal address from him after the meal. It chanced that on the list of guests there was, in addition to the mayor of their city and a well-known bishop of the Episcopal church, the manager of one of the greatest automobile factories in America. On the occasion on which this captain of industry spoke, he told in simple fashion his own experience in search of a vocation.

It was of a kind very common in our country: early privation, put to work at thirteen, an attempt to keep him in an office when he longed to have hold of the tools in the shop. In time his request was granted. While he worked he observed and studied the organization of the shop and the progression of the raw material to the finished product. Having mastered the method he left this shop and hired in another, and then in due time in still another shop, much to the disgust of his friends. But in reply to their warning that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" he said that that was not his aim. As a result of faithfully following his bent he was ready to respond to the great demand for men to organize and run bicycle factories, and when that demand was followed by the much greater need of doing a similar work in the manufacture of automobiles he was chosen for the very responsible position which he now holds.



There was, to be sure, nothing distinctly spiritual in his story, but after he had finished the young men kept him for two hours answering their questions and there was there revealed to the pastor more of their fine hopes and purposes and possibilities—their deep-buried yet vital dreams—than he had ever heard unfolded in any religious meeting. Many of these youths were taken in hand in a personal way and are now "making good." Their subsequent use of leisure, their patronage of evening schools, Y.M.C.A. courses, and many other helps to their ambitions testified to the depth and tenacity of good purposes which were timidly voiced but heroically executed. On the other hand, the writer has knowledge of many cases of delinquency in which apparently the deciding cause was the vocational misfit foisted upon the young would-be laborer in the trying years between fourteen and sixteen.

There comes to mind the instance of a lad of seventeen found in the Cook County jail. He had left his Michigan home with fifty dollars of savings and had come to Chicago to make his fortune. His mother's story, which was secured after he got into trouble, narrated how that as a boy he had taken to pieces the sewing-machine and the clocks and, unlike many boys, had put them together again without damage. Reaching Chicago he hired in a garage and conceived the idea of building an automobile. After the fashion of a boy he became totally absorbed in this project. His ingenuity and thrift and the help of his employers enabled him to get well along with his enterprise. But at last he was balked because of lack of a particular part which he knew to be essential, but as to the nature of which he was not informed.

Going along the street one day in profound concern over this matter an impulse seized him to learn at once the nature of the needed part. He jumped into an automobile standing by the curb, drove it to the nearest alley, and crawled under it to make the necessary disconnections, when the police caught him in the act. The case was a clear one and he was thrown into jail. The mother in her letter to the Juvenile Protective Association which was working for his release said that now, since he had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the authorities, she wondered whether they might not perform an operation for his benefit, for she had heard that there was an operation by which the skull could be opened and a certain part of the brain removed, and she thought that possibly they might do this for her boy and take out that part of his brain which made him so "wild about machinery"!

Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of intelligently connecting our educational product with the world's work. Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed home. The children who must in tender years be offered to our rapacious industries are the very children who are without hope of parental counsel and direction.

In New York City 42,000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of age take out their "working papers" every year, and out of 12,000 to 13,000 taking out working papers in Chicago annually about 9,000 are only fourteen years of age and 1,500 have not yet reached the fifth grade. Many of these walk the streets and degenerate while in search of work or because of such fitful employment as only serves to balk the department of compulsory education, which has the power to insist upon school attendance for children of this age if not employed.

It is not that work is uniformly bad for these children. Indeed, idleness would be worse. And it is not that all these children are forced to turn out bad. But as a matter of fact children under sixteen are not generally wanted save in positions of monotonous and unpromising employment, and their early experience, which is quite without reference to taste and native ability, is likely to turn them against all work as being an imposition rather than an opportunity. In the long run this cheap labor is the most expensive in the world, and society cannot afford to fully release children from school control and training prior to sixteen years of age. Much less can it permit them at any time to approach the employment problem blindly and unaided. Nor should it fail to reduce the hours of labor for such children as fall into permanently unprogressive toil and to organize their leisure as well as to provide opportunities whereby some may extricate themselves.

What is this industrial haste which cuts so much of our corn while it is only in tassel, that drives square pegs into round holes, that harnesses trotting stock to heavy drays and draughting stock to gigs, that breaks up the violin to kindle a fire quickly, thoughtless of the music, that takes telescopes for drain pipes and gets commerce—but not commerce with the stars? It is the delirium in which strong men seek the standard American testimonial of genius and ability, namely the accumulation of great wealth; and in this delirium they see labor as a commodity and childhood as a commercial factor. They do not think of people like themselves and of children like their own.

But the minister is the very champion of those higher rights, the defender of idealism, and as such the best friend of an industrial order which is perversely making this expensive blunder and reaping the blight of sullen citizenship and cynical and heartless toil. How can these thousands who, because of "blind-alley" occupations, come to their majority tradeless and often depleted, having no ability to build and own a home—how can these who have no stake in the country aid in making the republic what it ought to be? Partly they become a public care, expense, or nuisance, and largely they constitute the material for bossism and dynamite for the demagogue if he shall come. The economic breakdown, because of vocational misfit and the exploitation of childhood, usually results in a corresponding moral breakdown. To be doomed to inadequacy is almost to be elected to crime.

Now the pastor certainly cannot right all this wrong, neither will he be so brash as to charge it all up to malicious employers, ignoring the process through which our vaunted individualism, our free-field-and-no-favor policy, our doctrine for the strong has disported itself. But is it not reasonable that the minister inform himself of this problem in all its fundamental phases and that he both follow and ardently encourage a public-school policy which aims increasingly to fit the growing generation for productive and stable citizenship? Our schools are fundamentally religious if we will have them so in terms of character building, elemental self-respect, social service, and accountability to the God of all.

The "godless schools" exist only in the minds of those who for purposes of dispute and sectarianism decree them so. Furthermore, in every effort toward vocational training and sorting, the employer will be found interested and ready to help.

But to come more closely to the place of this problem in church work it must be recognized that the Sunday schools, clubs, and young people's societies offer wider opportunity for vocational direction than is now being used. The curricula in these institutions can be greatly vitalized and enlarged by the inclusion of this very interest, and life can be made to seem more broadly, sanely, and specifically religious than is now the case.

Suppose that to groups of boys beyond middle adolescence competent and high-minded representatives of various trades and professions present in series the reasons for their choice, the possible good, individual and social, which they see in their life-work, the qualifications which they deem necessary, and the obstacles to be met; and suppose further that the ethical code of a trade, profession, or business is presented for honest canvass by the class, must there not result a stimulus and aid to vocational selection and also a more lively interest in the study of specific moral problems? In this way teaching clusters about an inevitable field of interest, about live and often urgent problems, and there is nothing to prevent the use of all the light which may be adduced from the Bible and religious experience.

To describe the method more specifically, the lawyer presents his profession and subsequently the class discusses the code of the bar association; or the physician presents his work and then follows the canvass of the ethical problems of medical practice, and so of the trade-union artisan, the merchant or teacher, the minister, or the captain of industry. All of this is diffused with religion, it has its setting and sanction within the church, it supplements for a few, at any rate, the present lack in public education, and it is real and immediate rather than theoretical and remote.

Let this be complemented with visits to institutions, offices, plants, courts, and the marts and centers of commercial, industrial, and agricultural life; and, best of all, cemented in the personal friendship, practical interest and sponsorship of an adult and wise counselor who helps the boy both to the place and in the place; and, within the limits of the rather small constituency of church boys at least, there is guaranteed a piece of religious work that is bound to tell. For surely every legitimate interest of life is religious when handled by religious persons, and the right moral adjustment of the whole self to the whole world, with the emotion and idealism inhering in the process, is the task and content of religion.



CHAPTER VII

TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP[8]

The altruism of America is philanthropic rather than civic and in deliberate disregard of government, the average citizen of the United States has no equal. However intelligent or capable he may be, he is in the main a poor citizen. This habit of having no care for the ship of state and of seeking comfort and self-advantage, regardless of her future, is exactly the reverse of what one would expect. For by the manner of her birth and her natural genius the republic would seem to guarantee forever a high type of efficient public service.

But the capable and typical man of the church, and presumptively the man of conscience, studiously avoids the hazards of political life. It is not necessary to rehearse the well-known and deplorable results of this policy whereby the best men have generally avoided public office, especially in municipal government. Intelligence of the ills of the body politic or of the fact that it lies bruised and violated among thieves serves chiefly to divert the disgusted churchman to the other side of the road as he hastens to his destination of personal gain. Indeed it is not an uncommon thing for him to be a past master in circumventing or debauching government and in thus spreading the virus of political cynicism throughout the mass of the people.

Such a separation of church and state is hardly to be desired, and the call to political service is quite as urgent, quite as moral, and far more exacting than the perfectly just calls to foreign mission support and to the support of the great philanthropies of the day. Because of the influx of foreign peoples, the unsolved race problem, tardy economic reforms, uncertain justice, political corruption, and official mediocrity, America stands more in need of good citizenship than of generosity, more in need of statesmen than of clergymen.

No subsequent philanthropy can atone for misgovernment, and furthermore all social injustice, whether by positive act or simple neglect, tends to take toll from the defenseless classes. The more efficient extricate themselves, while the ignorant, the weak, the aged, and chiefly the little children bear the brunt of governmental folly. It is for this reason, together with the passing of materialistic standards of pomp and circumstance and the growing insistence upon human values, that the women are demanding full citizenship. And this new citizenship, including both women and men enfranchised upon the same basis, will not be without the ardor and heroism of those who in former days bore arms for the honor of their native land. For just behind the ranks are the unprotected children, the new generation whose opportunity and treatment constitutes the true measure of statesmanship.

But here as everywhere the only highway leading to that better tomorrow is thronged with little children upon whose training the issue hangs. What do the home, school, church, and community tell them as to citizenship, and, of more importance, what civic attitudes and actions are evoked?

The home, by picture and story and celebration, by the observance of birthdays, national and presidential, by the intelligent discussion of public interests, by respect for constituted authorities, by honest dealing, and by a constant exercise of public spirit as over against a selfish and detached aim, may do much to mold the boy's early civic attitude.

But most homes will do little of this, and both home and school fall short in pledging the new life to the common good and in guaranteeing to the state her just due. Frequently the home provides lavishly and at sacrifice for the comfort and even luxury of the children and exacts nothing in return. Mothers slave for sons and neglect, until it is too late, those just returns of service which make for honor and self-respect. Graft begins in the home, and it is amazing what pains we take to produce an ingrate and perforce a poor citizen.

Similarly, the boy attends the "free" schools. Here is further advantage without the thought of service in return, something for nothing—the open end of the public crib. But the public schools are not exactly free schools. Everything, whether at home or school, costs, and someone pays the bills. The prospective citizen should be made to realize this, and it would do him no harm actually to compute the cost. Through home and school, society is making an investment in him. Let him estimate in dollars and cents his indebtedness for food and clothing and shelter, travel, medical care, education and recreation, and all the other items of expense which have entered into his care and training for the fourteen or seventeen years of his dependency.

Such an exercise, which cannot include those invaluable offices of parental love and personal interest, may have a sobering effect, as will also a conscious appreciation of the social institutions and utilities which are the gift of former and contemporary generations of toilers.

But how can the schoolboy come into the self-respect of partnership? Probably by building up the consciousness of "our school" and by being sent from home with the idea of helping teacher and school in every way to accomplish the most and best for all concerned. Ordinarily the home supplies the child with no such suggestion and in some cases works even counter to the school and against good citizenship. The teacher is added to the ranks of the child's natural enemies, where unfortunately the policeman has long since been consigned; and the school?—that is something for which he carries no responsibility. Actual experiment of the opposite kind has proved most gratifying, and this immediate attitude toward his first public institution sets the child's will toward the practice of good citizenship in the years that lie ahead.

The curriculum of the elementary schools of Chicago makes a very thorough attempt to train the child in good citizenship, an attempt beginning with the anniversary days of the kindergarten and proceeding throughout the eight grades. In addition to history, civics of the most concrete and immediate kind is so presented that the child should be brought to an appreciation of the city's institutions and organized forces and of the common responsibility for the health and security of all the people. The same policy is pursued, unfortunately with diminishing attention, throughout the high-school course, and yet the superintendent of schools testifies that public education is failing to secure civic virtue. The children have not come into partnership with the school and other agencies of the common life, they have not achieved a nice sense of the rights of others, they have not been lifted to the ideal of service as being more noble than that of efficiency alone.

Of course there are many reasons for this: the quizzical temper of the community at large, the constant revelation of graft, the distorted school discipline which makes tardiness a more serious offense than lying or theft; the neglect to organize athletics and play for ethical ends; the criminal's code with regard to examinations—a code very prevalent in secondary schools, both public and private—that cheating is in order if one is not caught; the bitter and damaging personalities of party politics and the very transient honors of American public life; and, perhaps chief of all, the very elaborate provision for every child with the implication that he does the school a favor to use what is provided rather than the imposition of an obligation upon him both to help in securing the efficiency and beauty of the school and to discharge his just debt to society in the measure of his ability as boy and man.

Another productive cause of poor citizenship is the general contempt in which immigrants are held, and especially the treatment accorded them by the police and by most of the minor officials with whom they come in contact. This primitive disdain of "barbarians" is common among the school children and tends to make the foreign children more delinquent and anti-social than they would otherwise be. A very recent case sums up the situation. A gang of five Polish boys "beat up" a messenger boy, apparently without provocation. A Juvenile Protective officer visited the home of one of these young thugs for the purpose of talking with the mother and getting such information as would aid in keeping the boy from getting into further trouble.

The mother was found to be a very intelligent woman and explained to the officer that her boy had been constantly angered and practically spoiled at school; that it had been ground into him that he was nothing but a "Polack," and that no good thing was to be expected of him. The school boys had taken a hand in his education; and by reflecting in their own merciless way the uncharitable judgment of their elders had helped to produce this young pariah.

If one will but travel on the street cars in the crowded districts of our great cities and note the churlish discourtesy and sarcastic contempt with which "the foreigners" are generally treated, or will take the pains to ascertain how cruelly they are deceived and fleeced at almost every turn, one will soon conclude that we are making it very hard for these people and their children to become grateful and ardent citizens of the republic.

Looking to the improvement of this condition, while vocational training promises something by way of an economic basis for good citizenship, too much must not be expected of it alone. For if vocational efficiency be created and released in an environment devoid of civic idealism it will never pass beyond the grub stage. It will merely fatten a low order of life, and this at the expense of much that would otherwise lend verdure and freshness, shade, flower, and fruit to the garden of our common life. The able man or the rich man is not necessarily a good citizen.

That the state, like the home and school, should incessantly give its benefactions without binding youth to service in return is an egregious blunder. There should be some formal entrance into full citizenship, not only for those of us who, coming from other nations, must needs be "naturalized," but for all whom the years bring from the fair land of boyhood into the great and sober responsibilities of citizenship.

When a Greek youth took the oath of citizenship, he stood in the temple of Aglauros overlooking the city of Athens and the country beyond and said: "I will never disgrace these sacred arms nor desert my companions in the ranks. I will fight for temples and public property, both alone and with many. I will transmit my fatherland not only not less but greater and better than it was transmitted to me. I will obey the magistrates who may at any time be in power. I will observe both the existing laws and those which the people may unanimously hereafter make. And if any person seek to annul the laws or set them at naught, I will do my best to prevent him and will defend them both alone and with many. I will honor the religion of my fathers, and I call to witness Aglauros, Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, and Hegemone."

Now, the minister may think that no great part of the improved training for citizenship falls to him. He may be content to instill motives of individual piety, but upon reflection he must know that on nearly every hand there exist today great and insuperable barriers to his personal gospel. Behind the walls which imprison them are millions who cannot hear his message and those walls will not go down except by the creation of public sentiment which organizes itself and functions as law and government. The minister's exercise of citizenship should not be reserved for heaven, where it will not be needed, but should rather get into action here and now.

This means a pulpit policy which recognizes the great dimensions of the Kingdom of God, and seeks a moral alignment of church and state that will draw out the religious energy to vital and immediate issues, and will necessitate within the church herself clean-cut moral reactions to existing vital conditions. When the pulpit becomes sufficiently intelligent and bold to lay bare such issues the youth and manhood of the country will not in so large measure neglect the pew. Wherever real issues are drawn men and boys tend to assemble.



In the intricate social life of today a ministry devoted exclusively to plucking a few brands from the burning is somewhat archaic. The individual soul in its majestic value is not discounted, but it cannot be disentangled from the mass as easily as was once the case, or as easily as was once supposed. It was not so necessary to preach civic righteousness when "the gospel" was deemed sufficient so to transform the individual that all external limitations, ungodly conditions, and social injustices would yield to the regal ability of the child of God.

To recognize the environmental phase of salvation and to undertake this broader task in addition to the "cure of souls" may be to expose the minister to the cross-fire of economic sharp-shooters and a fusillade of sociological field guns. Besides, some of the supporters of the church will object and many will assert that the minister cannot qualify to speak with first-rate intelligence and authority upon the complex social problems of the day. Indeed, by endeavoring to utter a message of immediate significance in this field, he will discredit his more important mission as a "spiritual" leader. Again, if he should speak to the point on social issues no heed would be paid to his deliverances, and he has plenty to do in routine pastoral work.

The strength of these objections must be granted, and more especially so in the case of weak men, men of unripe judgment, of hasty and extravagant utterance, and of inferior training. For undoubtedly present-day problems of social welfare and such as affect religious living do lead back, not only into economic considerations, but also into questions of legislation and government.

But even so, will the minister consent to be without voice or program in the shaping of social ethics? Will he follow meekly and at a safe distance in the wake of the modern movement for economic justice and humane living conditions? Will he allow people to think for a moment that his job is to coddle a few of the elect and to solace a few of the victims of preventable hardship and injustice?

Suppose that, with the exception of denouncing the saloon and praising charity, he omits from his pulpit policy the creation of civic ideals and the drawing of moral issues in behalf of the higher life of all the people, will not the male population consider him rather too much engrossed with the little comforts, sentiments, and futilities of a religious club?

The entire precedent of the pulpit, both in biblical days and since, is wholly against such silence. If it is not the minister's business to know the problems of social ethics, so as to speak confidently to the situation from the standpoint of Jesus, whose province is it? Must he dodge the greatest moral problems of the day, all of which are collective? Has he not time and training so to master his own field that he will be second to none of his hearers in the possession of the relevant facts; and does he not presumably know the mind of Christ?

It is idle to say that his hearers will pay no heed, and it is idle to think that as a champion of justice and a better day he may not get a scar or so. But the man who has the mind of Christ toward the multitude and who thinks as highly of little children and their rights as did the Man of Galilee is going to be significant in making states and cities what they ought to be; and whatever disturbances may arise in the placid separatism of the church, the Kingdom itself will go marching on. The chief ingredient needed by the pulpit of today in order to inspire men and boys to noble citizenship is courage—moral courage.

But the new citizenship is in training for peace rather than for war, for world-wide justice rather than for national aggrandizement; and to this the Christian message lends itself with full force. The rehearsal of war and strife, the superficial view of history which sees only the smoke of battles and the monuments of military heroes, give place to an insight which traces the advancing welfare of the common people. The minister will inspire his formative citizens with good portrayals of statesmen, educators, inventors, reformers, discoverers, pioneers, and philanthropists. He will charm them into greatness at the very time when a boy's ideals overtop the mountains.

Conducive to the same end will be the rugged and humane ideals and activities of the Boy Scouts under his control; and all that is well done in the boys' clubs—the athletics, debates, trials, councils, literary and historical programs, addresses by respected public officials, visits to public institutions, the study of social conditions, especially in the young men's classes of the Sunday school—will make for the same good citizenship.

If the Men's Brotherhood is of significance in the community it is quite possible to bring political candidates before it for the statement of their claims and of the issues involved in any given campaign, and boys of fifteen years and over might well be invited to such meetings.

Then, too, such activities for community betterment as are outlined in the closing chapter of this book should be of some benefit, since the boy is to become a good citizen, not by hearing only but by doing; and the great success attending "Boy-City" organizations should inspire the pastor to attempt by this and other means the training of a new citizenship.

In fact, the matter is of sufficient importance to have a definite place in the Sunday-school curriculum and a boy might far better be informed on the plan of government, the civic dangers, and the line of action for a good man in his own city than to fail of that in an attempt to master the topography of Palestine or to recite perfectly the succession of the Israelitish kings.

If the minister has faith in a living God, if he believes that people are not less valuable now than they were four thousand years ago, if his Golden Age comprises the perfect will of God entempled in the whole creation, if he believes that this nation has some responsible part in the divine plan for the world, if he believes that righteousness is more desirable than pity and justice than philanthropy, and that the unrest of our times is but opportunity, he will in every way gird his boys for the battle and deliver constantly to the state trained recruits for the cause of human welfare which is ever the cause of God.



CHAPTER VIII

THE BOY'S RELIGIOUS LIFE[9]

Comparative religion is unable to make a satisfactory investigation of the successive stages in the religious life of the individual. For the purpose of religious education it is highly desirable to add to the historical survey and the ethnological cross-sections of comparative religion a longitudinal section of the religion of the individual. This, however, is impossible because the important data at the bottom of the series are unattainable. In the study of childhood, as in the study of a primitive race, the individual is so securely hidden away in the group that the most penetrating scientific method cannot find him, and the tendencies which are to integrate into religious experience are so taken in hand by the society which produces and envelops the new life that the student of religion must deal with a social product from the outset. The isolated religion of an individual does not exist, although in the more mature stages of prophetism and philosophy pronounced individual features always assert themselves.

The potential individuality in every child forbids, however, the assertion that he is only a mirror in which the religion of his immediate society and nothing more is reflected. There is from a very early time an active principle of personality, a growing selective power, a plus that comes out of the unmapped laboratory of creation, that may so arrange, transmute, and enrich the commonplace elements of the socio-religious matrix as to amount to genius. But, nevertheless, the newcomer can scarcely do more than select the given quarter which from day to day proves least unpleasant, while the fact of being on the great ship and in one cabin or another—or in the steerage—has been settled beforehand.

Hence the religious life of the boy depends largely upon family and community conditions which in turn rest upon economic considerations. Whatever demoralizes the home, degrades the community, and crushes out idealism also damns the souls of little children. It requires no deep investigation of modern society to prove that this is being done, and the guilt of economic injustice and rapacity is measured ultimately in the cost to the human spirit which in every child pleads for life and opportunity, and, alas, too often pleads in vain.

The pre-adolescent and imitative religious life of the boy is fairly communicative, but as soon as the actual struggle of achieving a personal religion sets in under the pubertal stress the sphinx itself is not more reticent. The normal boy is indisposed to talk about the affairs of his inner life. Probably they are too chaotic to formulate even to himself. If he is unspoiled he clothes his soul with a spiritual modesty which some of his sentimental elders might well cultivate. If he does break silence it will probably be in terms of the religious cult that has given him nurture. For all of these reasons it is exceedingly difficult to trace with certainty the development of his personal religion.

The indubitable and hopeful fact is that in every normal boy the potent germ of religion is present. Usually in early adolescence it bursts its casings and shoots into consciousness, powerfully affecting the emotions and the will. Certain stages of this process will be in the nature of crisis according to the strength of the opposition encountered in the personal moral struggle, and in opposing social conditions. Nothing but calamity can forestall this progressive moral adjustment to the whole world. To believe otherwise is to indict God for the purpose of covering our own blunders. In proportion as society prevents or perverts this moral outreach after God, it pollutes and endangers itself. The atmosphere that kills the lily creates the stench.

In the passage of the boy's religious life from the imitative type to the personal and energized form, or, as he experiences conversion, the battle is usually waged about some concrete moral problem. His conscience has become sensitive with regard to profanity, lying, impurity, or some particular moral weakness or maladjustment and his struggle centers on that. Being often defeated under the adolescent sense—pressure and confusion, he naturally seeks help, and help from the highest source of virtue. He has secreted somewhere in his heart ulterior ideals of service, but for the time being his chief concern is very properly himself; for if he "loses out" with himself he knows that all other worthy ambitions are annulled.

But a religious culture that keeps him in this self-centered feverish state is pathetically morbid and harmful. It short-circuits the religious life. This is the chief criticism of the devotional type of Christian culture. It seeks to prolong a crisis and often begets insincerity or disgust. The real priest of boyhood will certainly stand near by at this all-important time, but he will always manifest a refined respect for the birth-chamber of the soul. In patient and hopeful sympathy, in friendship that is personal and not professional, knowing that the door of the heart is opened only from within, the true minister, like his Master, waits. He knows, too, that a few words suffice in the great decisions of life, and that the handclasp of manly love speaks volumes. The prime qualification is a friendship that invites and respects confidence and a life that is above criticism.

Another important aid in bringing the boy over the threshold of vital and purposeful religion is the favorable influence of his group or "gang." The disposition to move together which is so pronounced in every other field must not be ignored here. The ideal club will be bringing the boy toward the altar of the church and at the right point along the way the minister who is properly intimate with each boy will be assured in private conference of the good faith and earnest purpose of his prospective church member.

Before receiving boys into active church membership it is well that they be given a course of instruction in a preparatory class. Only so can the fundamentals of religion and the duties of church membership be intelligently grasped. The value to the boy is also enhanced when the ceremony of induction is made formal and impressive to a degree that shall not be surpassed in his entrance into any other organization. By all means the boy should not be neglected after he has been received into the church. Mistakes of this sort are common wherever undue importance attaches to the conversion experience, and the numerical ideal of church success prevails. If the task becomes too great for the pastor let him find a responsible "big brother" for every boy received into the church.

As the critical or skeptical traits of youth develop in later adolescence the intellectual formulas and supports of religion will be overhauled. What the boy has brought over out of the early imitative and memorizing period of life will probably come up for review in later adolescence. If his inherited theology corresponds to experience and verifies itself in the light of the scientific methods of school and college no great difficulty will be experienced. But if it does not square with the youth's set of verifiable facts then there is added to his necessary moral struggle for self-possession and spiritual control the unnecessary and dangerous quest for a new faith, so that he is forced to swap horses in midstream and when the spring freshet is on.

Possibly this reorganization involved in the adolescent flux and reflection cannot be altogether avoided, but with proper care much could be done to lessen its dangers and to preserve a substantial continuity of religious experience from childhood through youth and to the end of life. It is a help not to have to be introduced to an altogether new God in these succeeding stages. To preserve his identity enriches and safeguards the life.

The imagination and wonder instinct of the child, his use of "natural religion," his confirmation in habits of prayer, reverence, and worship, his acquisition of choice religious literature by memorizing—can these interests be properly cared for without putting upon him a theological yoke which will subsequently involve pain and perhaps apostasy?

It is undoubtedly easier to point out the desirability of furnishing childhood with the materials of a time-proof religion than to provide such an instrument. And it is less difficult to criticize the indiscriminate use of the Bible in instructing the young than to set forth the type of education in religion which will satisfy alike the mental requirements of childhood and youth. What course should be followed with the pre-adolescent boy in order that the youth may be not less but more religious?

In offering any suggestion in this direction it should be borne in mind that natural religion or the religion of nature makes a strong appeal to the child. He readily believes in the presence of God in animate nature with all its wonder and beauty. Creatorship and the expression of the divine will in the normal processes are taken for granted. The orderly world is to him proof of mind and method; and perhaps the first mistake in the average religious teaching is the departure from this broad basis of faith to what is termed "revealed religion" and is at the same time the religion of miracle. The introduction of miracle as a basis of faith amounts to sowing the seeds of adolescent skepticism.

The child should be taught to deal with Jewish folk-lore as with that of any other people. While the incomparable religious value of the biblical literature should be used to the full, the Bible as a book should not be given artificial ranking. Nor should any belief contrary to his reason be imposed as an obligation. But the ever-open possibility of things that surpass present human comprehension should be preserved, and the sense of wonder which the scientist may ever have should be carefully nurtured. If the teacher violates the child's right to absolute honesty here let him not bemoan nor condemn the skepticism of later years.

The child can also believe in the presence of God in his own moral discernment. He can be taught to obey his sense of "ought" and to enjoy thereby, from very early years, a rich measure of harmony. Through such experience he discovers to himself the joy of being at one with God. He has proof of the constructive power of righteousness, and conversely he learns the destructive power of sin. He finds that the constituted order is essentially moral and that the duty of all alike is to conform to that fact.

He can easily comprehend also the struggle of the better self to rule over the worse self. The battle of the rational and spiritual to gain supremacy over the instinctive and animalistic is known to him. To be master of himself and to exercise a control that is more and more spiritual, to get the better of things and circumstances, to reduce his world to obedience to his gradually enlightened will—that is his task. In this he proves, under right guidance, the supremacy of the spiritual and may be encouraged to project it into a hope of personal immortality.

Very early, too, he gets some proof of the fact of human solidarity; especially so if he has brothers and sisters. The social character of good and the anti-social character of bad conduct is demonstrated day in and day out in the family. And enlargement of the concentric circles that bound his life only demonstrates over and over again the social nature of goodness. On this basis sufficient inspiration for personal righteousness and altruism is afforded by the world's need of just these things. Every normal child responds to the appeal of living to make the world better. Children always "want to help."

Apart from every speculative question the child accepts the ethical leadership of Jesus. And he should understand that discipleship consists in conduct that conforms to His spirit. To make the test creedal is not only contrary to the intensely pragmatic character of childhood but inimical to the resistless spirit of inquiry and speculation which breaks out in reflective youth. Childhood needs a religion of deeds. If a religion of dogma and detached sentiment is substituted the youth may some day awake to the fact that he can throw the whole thing overboard and experience a relief rather than a loss. If from his earliest experience in the home he has lived under the wholesome influence of applied rather than speculative Christianity, he will be spared much of the danger incident to theological reconstruction.

In emphasizing this point of applied Christianity, and as illustrating the fact that the boy's initial religious struggle, which necessitates a quest for God, centers about concrete temptations, it may be in place to make mention of a problem which lies very close to personal religion and social welfare. On the one hand the very altruism which is exalted and glorified in religion has its physical basis in the sex life, and on the other hand the sex life, unless it be guarded by religious control, ever threatens to devastate all the higher values of the soul. Hence the problem of the boy's personal purity has profound religious significance.

As yet there is little consensus of opinion as to the best way of keeping him pure. Parents, educators, and religious leaders, however, are showing increased concern over this difficult problem, and there is good ground to believe that prudery and indifference must gradually give place to frank and intelligent consideration of this vital and difficult subject.

It must be granted, however, that it is as impossible as it is undesirable to keep the boy ignorant. His own natural curiosity, together with his school and street experience, are fatal to such a Fool's Paradise. Moreover, the general attitude of suppression and secrecy rather stimulates curiosity, and often amounts to the plain implication that everything that has to do with the perpetuation of our species is of necessity evil and shameful. This "conspiracy of silence" makes against true virtue. Religious instruction, based upon the confession of the repentant David, "Behold, I was begotten in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me," has helped to perpetuate a sinister attitude toward this whole question—an attitude not without some foundation in the moral history of man.

It has also been convenient and consistent, in support of the doctrine of man's depravity, to exploit this dark view so as to make him a fit subject for redemption. Somehow, the traditional "Fall" and procreation have been so associated in religious thinking that it has been practically impossible for the religious mind to entertain any favorable consideration of the physical conditions of human genesis. Very naturally that which is under the ban, being the seat of human sin, the bond that binds each generation to fallen Adamic nature, must take its place as surreptitious and evil—and never positively within the sanctioned and ordained agencies of God.

Does such an attitude contribute to man's highest good and to the strength and scope of religious control? Is it better to alienate and outlaw so important a phase of human existence or to bring it into intelligent accord with the divine will? Is it not conceivable that in this field, as in every other that is normal to human life, there will be a gain to humanity, and to the value of religion as a helper of mankind, by a frank attempt to bring the whole life to the dignifying conception of a reasonable service to one's Maker?

Granting that such an attempt is desirable, we come face to face with the necessity of imparting such information as will make the boy's way of duty plain, and will elevate the subject to a place of purity and religious worth. In this process of instruction, which is nothing less than a sacred responsibility, the most common fault of the parent, physician, teacher, and pastor is that of delay. By the time a boy is eight years of age, he should have been informed as to his residence within and his birth from his mother, and this in such a way as wonderfully to deepen his love for her, and to beget in him a respect for all women to the end of his life.

It is well that the mother should first inform him in that spirit of utmost confidence which shall preclude his indiscriminate talk with other people upon this subject. He should know, too, that further information will be given as he needs it, and that he can trust his parents to be frank and true with him in this as in everything else. By all means let the mother tell the story and not some unfortunately vicious or polluted companion. There are three reasons at least for informing him thus early in life. One is that sufficient curiosity has usually developed by this time, another is that the first information should come from a pure source, and a third is that this instruction should anticipate sex consciousness and the indecent language and suggestions of school and street.

In the same spirit will the father impart to the boy a little later the fact of the original residence within himself of the seed from which the boy grew. By the father's reverent treatment of the subject in the hour of a boy's confidence, and in response to his just curiosity, he may hallow forever the boy's conception of the marriage relation and emphasize the vast amount of tenderness and regard that is due every mother. For the boy to feel sure that he has been told the truth by his father, and to realize that his father regards these facts in an honorable and clean way, will rob a thousand indecent stories of their damage.

It belongs to the father to redeem the boy's idea of human procreation from obscenity, and, under right conditions, to have this process regarded by his boy as the most wonderful responsibility that falls to man. Sometime before the boy has reached thirteen, the father will have explained to him the facts and temptations of the pubescent period. The crime of allowing boys in middle and later adolescence to worry themselves sick over normal nocturnal emissions, and often to fall into the hands of the quack, or of the advocate of illicit intercourse, lies at the door of the negligent father.

The enervating results of self-abuse, the loss of manliness and self-respect, and the possible damage to future offspring will have weight in safeguarding the boy who has already been fortified by a high and just conception of the procreative power which is to be his. Moreover, in the severe battle that is waged for self-control, the boy should be given every aid of proper hygiene in clothing, sleeping conditions, baths, exercise, diet, and social intercourse. Plenty of exercise but not thorough exhaustion, good athletic ideals, a spare diet at night, good hours, and freedom from evil suggestion, entertainments, or reading; his time and attention healthfully occupied—these precautions, in addition to enlightenment as above indicated, will, if there are no conditions calling for minor surgery, go a long way toward preserving the boy's integrity under the temptations incident to sex life. It is to be feared that many boys have been wronged by the failure of parents and physicians to have some slight operation—either circumcision or its equivalent—performed in the early days of infancy.

Books on the subject are not best for the boy. They tend to make him morbid and often stimulate the evil which they seek to cure. Nor is it wise, prior to the age of fifteen, to open up the loathsome side of the subject, concerning the diseases that are the outcome of the social evil. After that age, talks by a reputable physician, pointing out the terrible results to oneself, his wife, and his descendants, may be fitting and helpful. The minister should make frequent use of the physician in having him address on different occasions the fathers and the mothers of the boys. To hold such meetings in the church building is an altogether worthy use of the institution.

In cases where parent and physician have failed to do their duty, and the pastor is on proper terms of friendship with the boy, it becomes his duty to tell the boy plainly and purely a few of the important things which he ought to know in order to avoid moral shipwreck.

If credence is to be given to the startling reports of immorality in high schools, based, as is commonly claimed, upon ignorance, then the time has certainly come for plain speech, and the boys and girls should be gathered together in separate companies for instruction in sex hygiene and morality. Any education which makes no deliberate attempt to conserve human happiness and social welfare in this important respect is inadequate and culpable. The testimony that comes from juvenile courts, girls' rescue homes, and boys' reformatories constitutes a grave indictment of society for its neglect to impart proper information.

It is part of the minister's task to work for a better day in this as in every phase of moral achievement. Next to the physician he best knows the mental and physical suffering, the moral defeat, and the awful injustice to women and children whom the libertine pollutes with incurable diseases. If he is a true pastor, he will strive to keep the boys pure through expert instruction to parents, through personal advice, through wholesome activity and recreation, through courses on sexual hygiene in the public schools, through war on indecency in billboard, dance, and theater, through absolute chastity of speech, and, in general, through an ideal of life and service which shall lift the boys' ambitions out of the low and unhealthy levels of sense gratification. To put the spiritual nature in control is his high and sacred opportunity.

The importance of the minister's part in this struggle for the body and soul of youth is based upon the fact that in this critical encounter there is no aid that is comparable with religion. Thousands of honest, serious-minded men frankly confess that in modern conditions they see little hope of this battle being won without religion as a sanction of right conduct. The boy needs God, a God to whom he can pray in the hour of temptation. He needs to regard his life with all its powers as God's investment, which he must not squander or pervert.

Here, as everywhere else in boy-life, the loyalty appeal, which, as nothing else, will keep him true to mother and father, to society, and to God, stands the religious leader in good stead. Upon honor he will not violate the confidence of his parents, and the trust imposed in him by his Maker. Upon honor he will deport himself toward the opposite sex as he would wish other boys to regard his own sister; and the religious teacher has it within his power, if he will keep in touch with boys, to create and preserve an ideal of manly chivalry that will effectively withstand both the insidious temptations of secret sin and the bolder inducements of social vice.

This can never be done by the formal work of the pulpit alone. Nothing but the influence of a pure, strong man, mediated in part through the parents of the boy, supported by scientific facts, and operating directly on the boy's life, through the mighty medium of a personal friendship, can perform this saving ministry. If there were nothing more to be gained through intimate acquaintance with boys than thus fortifying them in this one inevitable and prolonged struggle, it would warrant all the energy and time consumed in the minister's attempt to enter into the hallowed friendship and frank admiration of the boys of his parish.

For such reasons it is important that the implications of discipleship be made very plain to the boy, and this in terms of specific conduct in the home, at school, on the playground, at work, and in all the usual social relations. Without this, there may be fatal inconsistencies in the boy's conduct, not because he is essentially vicious, but because he has been unable to interpret high-sounding sermons and biblical ideals in terms of commonplace duty. If the evangelical message encourages, condones, or permits this divorce, it becomes an instrument of incalculable harm. Boys must be held to a high and reasonable standard of personal duty and group endeavor.

From this point of view the weakest feature of the church boys' club is its tendency to overlook specific work for others. The serious-minded leader will not be altogether satisfied in merely holding boys together for a "good time," wholesome as that may be. The service ideal must be incorporated in the activities of the club. The nascent altruism of the boy should receive impetus and direction and the members should engage in united and intelligent social service. Give the boy a worthy job; give him a hard job; give him a job that calls for team work; and give him help and appreciation in the doing of it.

It is sometimes difficult to devise and execute a program of this kind because of the limited opportunities of the particular town in which the club exists and the narrow ideals of the church with which the club is affiliated. Yet it is always preferable to enlist the boys in some altruistic enterprise which lies close enough at hand to give it the full weight of reality. Only so can we satisfy the concrete value-judgment of the young matriculant in the great school of applied religion.

This, however, should not be to the exclusion of those vast idealistic movements for human good embodied in world-wide missionary propaganda of a medical, educational, and evangelistic type. Only, taking the boy as he is, it is not best to begin with these, because of their lack of reality to him and because of his inability to participate except by proxy. It is well that he should extend himself to some faraway need by contributing of his means, but these gifts will get their proper significance and his philanthropic life will preserve its integrity by performing the particular service which to his own immediate knowledge needs to be done.

The proper care and beautifying of the streets and public places in his own community, the collection of literature for prisoners or the inmates of asylums or hospitals near at hand, supplying play equipment, clothing, or any useful thing for unfortunate boys in congested city districts, helping the minister and church in the distribution of printed matter and alms, aiding smaller boys in the organization of their games, helping some indigent widow, giving an entertainment, selling tickets, souvenirs, or any merchantable article which they may properly handle for the purpose of devoting the profits to some immediate charity; making for sale articles in wood, metal, or leather for the same purpose; winning other boys from bad associations to the better influences of their own group, helping in the conduct of public worship by song or otherwise, acting as messengers and minute-men for the pastor—something of this sort should engage part of their time and attention in order that they may be drawn into harmony with the spirit of the church.



Ordinarily the general administration of the church could be made more effective and the standard activities more attractive if the preacher would keep the boy in mind in constructing and illustrating his sermons and would make appeal to the known interests of boyhood; and if music committees would adopt a policy for the development and use of his musical ability instead of stifling and ignoring this valuable religious asset and rendering the boy, so far forth, useless to and estranged from the purposes and activities of the church. In church music the paid quartette alone means the way of least resistance and of least benefit, and it is a harmful device if it means the failure of the church to enlist boys in the rare religious development to be achieved in sacred song and in participation in public worship. It is to be regretted that hymns suited to boyhood experience are very rare and that so little effort is made to interest and use the boy in the stated worship of the church.

But if these evils were remedied there would still be the problem of the Sunday school which, although generally a worthy institution, usually succeeds at the cost of the church-going habit which might otherwise be cultivated in the boy. To make a Sunday-school boy instead of a church boy is a net loss, and with the present Sunday congestion there is little likelihood of securing both of these ends. Probably it will become necessary to transfer what is now Sunday-school work to week-day periods as well as to renovate public worship before a new generation of churchmen can be guaranteed.

In the meantime, loyalty cultivated by a variety of wholesome contacts largely outside of traditional church work must serve to win and retain the boys of today. For loyalty to the minister who serves them readily passes over into loyalty to the church which he likewise serves. Wherever the club is made up predominantly of boys from the church families, it will be well to have an occasional service planned especially for the boys themselves—one which they will attend in a body. Such a Sunday-evening service for boys and young men may be held regularly once a month with good success, and the value of such meetings is often enhanced by short talks from representative Christian laymen. Demands for service as well as the important questions of personal religion should be dealt with in a manly, straightforward way. Beating about the bush forfeits the boy's respect.

In preaching to boys the minister will appeal frankly to manly and heroic qualities. He will advance no dark premise of their natural estrangement from God, but will postulate for all a sonship which is at once a divine challenge to the best that is in them and the guaranty that the best is the normal and the God-intended life. They must qualify for a great campaign under the greatest soul that ever lived. They engage to stand with Him against sin in self and in all the world about, and in proportion as they take on His mission will they realize the necessity of high personal standards and of that help which God gives to all who are dedicated to the realization of the Kingdom.

The normal boy will not deliberately choose to sponge upon the world. He intends to do the fair thing and to amount to something. He dreams of making his life an actual contribution to the welfare and glory of humanity. When it is put before him rightly he will scorn a selfish misappropriation of his life, and will enter the crusade for the city that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. Happy is the minister who has boys that bring their chums to see him for the purpose of enlistment. Happy is the minister whose hand often clasps the outstretched hand of the boy pledging himself to the greatest of all projects—the Kingdom of God in the earth; to the greatest of all companies—the company of those who in all time have had part in that task; and to the greatest of all captains—Jesus of Nazareth.



CHAPTER IX

THE CHURCH BOYS' CLUB[10]

Those who know the boy best can hardly be persuaded that the Sunday school can be made to satisfy his intense demand for action. Yet action is an important factor in religious education. Commendable efforts are being made to introduce more of handicraft and artistic expression into the work of the Sunday-school class; but from the boy's point of view, the making of maps, illuminated texts, and temple models does not fully meet his desire for doing. The character of the Sunday school, its place of meeting, and the proper observance of the day preclude the more noisy, varied, and spontaneous activities which may be made to carry moral and religious value.

Another agency is needed in the church that can be more venturesome and free than the Sunday school, an agency that can act on the parallel of the boy's natural interests and adapt its methods to his unfolding life in terms of action. The Sunday school can stick to its task of elucidating the history and theory of religion; but the boys' club is a better place for securing the expression of religious principles and so confirming them in character. When the Sunday school shall have reached its highest point of efficiency it will still have failed to cover the most vital element in the moral and religious training of the boy simply because it will still be a Sunday school and, presumably, a Bible school. That is, it will have not only the benefits but also the limitations of the sacred day and of the book method of instruction. The boy needs something more than "a society for sitting still."

But some will say, "Why take the boy out of the home at all? The good home, the public school, and the established agencies of religion are enough. A club is not needed." It might be replied that all boys do not have good homes and that relatively few attend church or Sunday school; but if that were not the case the desirability of the boys' club would still be apparent. The fact is that the boy gets out of the home anyway and seeks his group. There is a process of socialization and self-discovery for which the best home-circle cannot provide; and the club only recognizes and uses this "gang" instinct. It capitalizes for good the normal social desires of the boy. In so doing it does not necessarily conflict with a single good element in the home, but is rather the first formal token of citizenship and the guarantor of proper deportment in the midst of one's peers.

In a well-directed club the consensus of opinion will usually be more effective in securing good conduct than the father's neglected or fitful discipline or the mother's endless forbearance. The boy has profound respect for the judgment of his equals; and wherever the leader can make the group ideals right he can be practically assured of the conformity of all who come within the group influence. "The way we do here," "the thing we stand for," constitutes a moral leverage that removes mountains. The boy that has been too much sheltered needs it, the boy that has been neglected and is whimsical or non-social needs it, the only son often needs it, and the boy who is distinguished by misconduct in the Sunday-school class needs it.

The club is never justified, then, in offending against the home. Keeping young boys out late at night, interfering with home duties or with the implicit confidence between a boy and his parents, or dragging him off into some sectarian camp away from his family is not to be tolerated. This is never necessary, and the wise leader can always co-operate harmoniously with the home if he takes thought so to do.

But the leader who fails to recognize the sanctity and priority of the home, who permits his interest in boys to be blind to home conditions and influence, or who does not approach the home problems as a reverent and intelligent helper is very far from an ideal workman. One great advantage of the small club in the church consists in this personalized and teachable interest which gets in close by the side of perplexed, ignorant, weak, or neglectful parents and seeks to raise the home as an institution so that all its members, including the boy, may be richly benefited. To be a pastor rather than a mere herdsman of boys one must know their fold. It is well enough to be proud of the boys' club but it is good "boys' work" to develop home industry and to encourage habits of thrift and of systematic work that shall bless and please the home circle. The boy may far better work too hard for the communal welfare of the home than to grow up an idle pleasure-seeking parasite.

It is taken for granted that the wise pastor will think twice before organizing a boys' club. It were better for him to leave the whole enterprise in the innocent realm of his castles in Spain than to add another failure to the many that have been made in this attractive and difficult field. Enthusiasm is essential, but taken alone it is an embarrassing qualification. Therefore he should make a careful inventory of his available assets. If he contemplates personal leadership he would do well to list his own qualifications. In any event he will need to be familiar with the boy-life of his community, with all that endangers it and with all that is being done to safeguard and develop it in accord with Christian ideals. If the boys of his parish are already adequately cared for he will not feel called upon to bring coals to Newcastle.

His personal inventory must needs take into account his tastes and ability. These will be determined frequently by the mere matter of age; for undoubtedly the earlier years of one's ministry lie a little nearer to the interests of boyhood and at this time the knack of the athletic training received in school or college has not been wholly lost. The leader may recover or increase his ability in games by taking a course at the Y.M.C.A.

If he finds within himself a deep love for boys that gets pleasure rather than irritation from their obstreperous companionship, if he is endowed with kindness that is as firm as adamant in resisting every unfair advantage—which some will surely seek to take—if he is noise-proof and furnished with an ample fund of humor that is scrupulously clean and moderately dignified, if he possesses a quiet, positive manner that becomes more quiet and positive in intense and stormy situations, if he is withal teachable, alert, resourceful, and an embodiment of the "square-deal" principle, and if he is prepared to set aside everything that might interfere with the religious observance of every single appointment with his boys—then he may consider himself eligible for the attempt.

But how will he go about it? Shall he print posters of a great mass-meeting to organize a boys' club? Shall he besiege his church for expensive equipment, perhaps for a new building? Shall he ask for an appropriation for work which most of the people have not seen, and of whose value they cannot judge except from his enthusiastic prophecies? Let us hope not. To succeed in such requests might be to die like Samson; while to fail in them would be a testimony to the sanity of his responsible parishioners.

There is a better way—a way that is more quiet, natural, and effective. Possibly there is already in the Sunday school a class of eight or ten boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen years. Let the pastor become well acquainted with them and at first merely suggest—in their class session or when he has them in his study or home—what other boys have done in clubs of their own. He need not volunteer to provide such a club, but merely indicate his willingness to help if they are interested and prepared to work for it. If the boys respond, as they undoubtedly will, then the pastor will need to find a few sympathizers who will give some financial and moral assistance to the endeavor. He may find some of these outside the church, and often such friends are the more ready to help, because they are not already taxed to carry on the established church work.