Title: The Minister and the Boy - A Handbook for Churchmen Engaged in Boys' Work
Author: Hoben, Allan, 1874-
Language: English
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THE MINISTER AND THE BOY

A Handbook for Churchmen Engaged in Boys' Work

by

ALLAN HOBEN, PH.D.
Associate Professor of Practical Theology, The University of Chicago
Field Secretary of the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association

1912



PREFACE


The aim of this book is to call the attention of ministers to the
important place which boys' work may have in furthering the Kingdom of
God. To this end an endeavor is made to quicken the minister's
appreciation of boys, to stimulate his study of them, and to suggest a
few practical ways in which church work with boys may be conducted.

The author is indebted to the Union Church of Waupun, Wis., and to the
First Baptist Church of Detroit, Mich., for the opportunity of working
out in actual practice most of the suggestions incorporated in this
book. He is also indebted to many authors, especially to President G.
Stanley Hall, for a point of view which throws considerable light upon
boy nature. The Boy-Scout pictures have been provided by Mr. H.H.
Simmons, the others by Mr. D.B. Stewart, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, and the
author. The greatest contribution is from the boys of both village and
city with whom the author has had the privilege of comradeship and from
whom he has learned most of what is here recorded.

The material has been used in talks to teachers and clubs of various
sorts, and in the Men and Religion Forward Movement. The requests
following upon such talks and arising also from publication of most of
the material in the _Biblical World_ have encouraged this attempt to
present a brief handbook for ministers and laymen who engage in church
work for boys.

ALLAN HOBEN

CHICAGO, August 19, 1912



TABLE OF CONTENTS


    I. THE CALL OF BOYHOOD
   II. AN APPROACH TO BOYHOOD
  III. THE BOY IN VILLAGE AND COUNTRY
   IV. THE MODERN CITY AND THE NORMAL BOY
    V. THE ETHICAL VALUE OF ORGANIZED PLAY
   VI. THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION
  VII. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP
 VIII. THE BOY'S RELIGIOUS LIFE
   IX. THE CHURCH BOYS' CLUB



CHAPTER I

THE CALL OF BOYHOOD


The Christian apologetic for today depends less upon the arguments of
speculative theology and the findings of biblical science than upon
sociological considerations. The church is dealing with a pragmatic
public which insists upon knowing what this or that institution
accomplishes for the common good. The deep and growing interest in
social science, the crying needs that it lays bare, together with
socialistic dreams of human welfare, compel Christian workers to pay
more heed to the life that now is, since individualistic views of
salvation in the world to come do not fully satisfy the modern
consciousness.

Hence the ministry is compelled more and more to address itself to the
salvation of the community and the nation after the fashion of the
Hebrew prophets. Lines of distinction also between what is religious and
what is secular in education and in all human intercourse have become
irregular or dim; and the task of bringing mankind to fullness and
perfection of life has become the task alike of the educator,  the
minister, the legislator, and the social worker. In fact, all who in any
capacity put their hands to this noble undertaking are co-workers with
Him whose divine ideal was to be consummated in the Kingdom of God on
earth.

The ministry, therefore, is taking on a great variety of forms of
service, and the pastor is overtaxed. The church, moreover, is slow to
recognize the principle of the division of labor and to employ a
sufficient number of paid officers. Only the pressing importance of work
for boys can excuse one for suggesting another duty to the conscientious
and overworked pastor. Already too much has been delegated to him alone.
Every day his acknowledged obligations outrun his time and strength, and
he must choose but a few of the many duties ever pressing to be done.
Yet there is no phase of that larger social and educational conception
of the pastor's work that has in it more of promise than his ministry to
boys. Whatever must be neglected, the boy should not be overlooked.

To answer this complex demand and the call of boyhood in particular the
pastor must be a leader and an organizer. Otherwise, troubles and
vicissitudes await him. In every field unused possibilities hasten the
day of his departure. Idle persons who should have been led into worthy
achievement for Christ and the church fall into critical gossip, and
there soon follows another siege perilous for the minister's
freight-wracked furniture, another flitting experience for his homeless
children, another proof of his wife's heroic love, and another scar on
his own bewildered heart.

It is, indeed, difficult for the pastor to adopt a policy commensurate
with modern demands. He should lead, but on the other hand a very
legitimate fear of being discredited through failure deters him;
traditional methods hold the field; peace at any price and pleasurable
satisfaction play a large part in church affairs; the adult, whose
character is already formed, receives disproportionate attention; money
for purposes of experimentation in church work is hard to get;
everything points to moderation and the beaten path; and the way of the
church is too often the way of least resistance. Small wonder if the
minister sometimes capitulates to things as they are and resigns himself
to the ecclesiastical treadmill.

It requires no small amount of courage to be governed by the facts as
they confront the intelligent pastor, to direct one's effort where it is
most needed and where it will,  in the long run, produce the greatest
and best results. To be sure, the adult needs the ministry of teaching,
inspiration, correction, and comfort to fit him for daily living; but,
as matters now stand, the chief significance of the adult lies in the
use that can be made of him in winning the next generation for Christ.
In so far as the adult membership may contribute to this it may lay
claim to the best that the minister has. In so far as it regards his
ministry as a means of personal pleasure, gratification, and religious
luxury, it is both an insult to him and an offense to his Master.

A successful ministry to boys, whether by the pastor himself or by those
whom he shall inspire and guide, is fundamental in good pastoral work.
Boys now at the age of twelve or fifteen will, in a score of years,
manage the affairs of the world. All that has been accomplished--the
inventions, the wealth, the experience in education and government, the
vast industrial and commercial systems, the administration of justice,
the concerns of religion--all will pass into their control; and they
who, with the help of the girls of today, must administer the world's
affairs, are, or may be, in our hands now when their ideals are nascent
and their whole natures in flux.

Boys' work, then, is not providing harmless amusement for a few
troublesome youngsters; it is the natural way of capturing the modern
world for Jesus Christ. It lays hold of life in the making, it creates
the masters of tomorrow; and may pre-empt for the Kingdom of God the
varied activities and startling conquests of our titanic age. Think of
the great relay of untamed and unharnessed vigor, a new nation exultant
in hope, undaunted as yet by the experiences that have halted the
passing generation: what may they not accomplish? As significant as the
awakening of China should the awakening of this new nation be to us. In
each case the call for leadership is imperative, and the best ability is
none too good. Dabblers and incompetent persons will work only havoc,
whether in the Celestial Empire or in the equally potent Kingdom of
Boyhood. The bookworm, of course, is unfit even if he could hear the
call, and the nervous wreck is doomed even if he should hear it; but the
fit man who hears and heeds may prevent no small amount of delinquency
and misery, and may deliver many from moral and social insolvency.

If a minister can do this work even indirectly he is happy, but if he
can do it directly by virtue of his wholesome character, his genuine
knowledge and love of boys, his athletic skill, and his unabated zest
for life, his lot is above that of kings and his reward above all
earthly riches.

Then, too, it is not alone the potential value of boys for the Kingdom
of God, and what the minister may do for them; but what may they not do
for him? How fatal is the boy collective to all artificiality,
sanctimony, weakness, make-believe, and jointless dignity; and how prone
is the ministry to these psychological and semi-physical pests! For,
owing to the demands of the pulpit and of private and social
intercourse, the minister finds it necessary to talk more than most men.
He must also theorize extensively because of the very nature of
theological discipline. Moreover, he is occupied particularly with those
affairs of the inner life which are as intangible as they are important.
His relation with people is largely a Sunday relation, or at any rate a
religious one, and he meets them on the pacific side. Very naturally
they reveal to him their best selves, and, true to Christian charity and
training, he sees the best in everyone. If the women of his parish
receive more than their proper share of attention the situation is
proportionately worse. It follows that the minister needs the most
wholesome contact with stern reality in order to offset the subtle drift
toward a remote, theoretical, or sentimental world. In this respect
commercial life is more favorable to naturalness and virility; while a
fair amount of manual labor is conducive to sanity, mental poise, and
sound judgment as to the facts of life. The minister must have an
elemental knowledge of and respect for objective reality; and he must
know human nature.

Now among all the broad and rich human contacts that can put the
minister in touch with vital realities there is none so electric, so
near to revelation as the boy. Collectively he is frank to the point of
cruelty and as elemental as a savage. Confronted alone and by the
minister, who is not as yet his chum, he reveals chiefly the minister's
helplessness. Taken in company with his companions and in his play he is
a veritable searchlight laying bare those manly and ante-professional
qualities which must underlie an efficient ministry. Later life, indeed,
wears the mask, praises dry sermons, smiles when bored, and takes
careful precautions against spontaneity and the indiscretions of
unvarnished truth; but the boy among his fellows and on his own ground
represents the normal and unfettered reaction of the human heart to a
given personality. The minister may be profoundly benefited by knowing
and heeding the frank estimate of a "bunch" of boys. They are the
advance agents of the final judgment; they will find the essential man.
May it not be with him as with Kipling's Tomlinson, who, under the
examination of both "Peter" and the "little devils," was unable to
qualify for admission either to heaven or hell:

    And back they came with the tattered Thing, as
       children after play,
    And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has
       bartered clean away.
    We have threshed a stook of print and book, and
       winnowed a chattering wind
    And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we
       cannot find:
    We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have
       seared him to the bone,
    And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul
       of his own."

Fortunately, however, ministerial professionalism is on the wane.
Protestantism, in its more democratic forms, rates the man more and the
office less, and present-day tests of practical efficiency are adverse
to empty titles and pious assumption. To be "Reverend" means such
character and deeds as compel  _reverence_ and not the mere "laying on
of hands." Work with boys discovers this basis, for there is no place
for the holy tone in such work, nor for the strained and vapid quotation
of Scripture, no place for excessively feminine virtues, nor for the
professional hand-shake and the habitual inquiry after the family's
health. In a very real sense many a minister can be saved by the boys;
he can be saved from that invidious classification of adult society into
"men, women, and ministers," which is credited to the sharp insight of
George Eliot.

The minister is also in need of a touch of humor in his work. The
sadness of human failure and loss, the insuperable difficulties of his
task, the combined woes of his parish, the decorum and seriousness of
pulpit work--all operate to dry up the healthy spring of humor that
bubbled up and overran in his boyhood days. What health there is in a
laugh, what good-natured endurance in the man whose humor enables him to
"side-step" disastrous and unnecessary encounters and to love people
none the less, even when they provoke inward merriment. The boys' pastor
will certainly take life seriously, but he cannot take it somberly.
Somewhere in his kind, honest eye there is a glimmer, a blessed survival
of his own boyhood.

So, being ministered to by the comradeship of boys, he retains his
sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the
verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important
committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological
inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor. Life
cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams
of living water and into the whispering woods he catches again the wild
charm of that all-possible past: the smell of the campfire, the joyous
freedom and good health of God's great out-of-doors. Genius and success
in life depend largely upon retaining the boyish quality of enthusiastic
abandon to one's cause, the hearty release of one's entire energy in a
given pursuit, and the conviction that the world is ever new and all
things possible. The thing in men that defies failure is the original
boy, and "no man is really a man who has lost out of him all the boy."

The boy may also be a very practical helper in the pastor's work. In
every community there are some homes in which the pastor finds it almost
impossible to create a welcome for himself. Misconceptions of long
standing, anti-church sentiments, old grievances block the way. But if
in such a home there is a boy whose loyalty the pastor has won through
association in the boys' club, at play, in camp--anywhere and
anyhow--his eager hand will open both home and parental hearts to the
wholesome friendship and kindly counsel of the minister of Christ. When
the boy's welfare is at stake how many prejudices fade away! The
reliable sentiment of fathers and mothers dictates that he who takes
time to know and help their boy is of all persons a guest to be welcomed
and honored, and withal, a practical interpreter of Christianity. The
pastor whose advance agent is a boy has gracious passport into the homes
where he is most needed. He has a friend at court. His cause is almost
won before he has uttered one syllable of a formal plea.

Further, it must be apparent to all intelligent observers that the
churches in most communities are in need of a more visible social
sanction for their existence. In the thought of many they are expensive
and over-numerous institutions detached from the actual community life
and needs. Boys' work constitutes one visible strand of connection with
the live needs of the neighborhood; and, human nature being what it is,
this tangible service is essential to the formation of a just, popular
estimate of the church and the ministry. Talk is easy and the market is
always overstocked. The shortage is in deeds, and the doubtful community
is saying to the minister, "What do you do?" It is well if among other
things of almost equal importance he can reply, "We are saving your boys
from vice and low ideals, from broken health and ruined or useless
lives, by providing for wholesome self-expression under clean and
inspiring auspices. The Corban of false sanctity has been removed; our
plant and our men are here to promote human welfare in every legitimate
way." Boys' work affords a concrete social sanction that has in it a
wealth of sentiment and far-reaching implications.

Closely allied with this is the help that the boy renders as an
advertiser. The boy is a tremendous promoter of his uppermost interest;
and, while boys' work must not be exploited for cheap and unworthy
advertising purposes but solely for the good of the boy himself, the
fact remains that the boy is an enterprising publicity bureau. The
minister who gives the boy his due of love, service, and friendship will
unwittingly secure more and better publicity than his more scholastic
and less human brother. In the home and at school, here, there, and
everywhere, these unrivaled enthusiasts sound the praises of the
institution and the man. Others of their own kind are interested, and
reluctant adults are finally drawn into the current. The man or church
that is doing a real work for boys is as a city set on a hill.

The pastor needs the boys because his task is to enlist and train the
Christians and churchmen of the future. These should be more efficient
and devoted than those of the present, and should reckon among their
dearest memories the early joyous associations formed within the church.
Many thoughtful ministers are perplexed by the alienation of
wage-earners from the church; but what could not be accomplished in the
betterment of this condition if for one generation the churches would
bend their utmost devotion and wisdom to maintaining institutions that
would be worth while for all the boys of the community? A boy genuinely
interested and properly treated is not going to turn his back upon the
institution or the man that has given him the most wholesome enjoyment
and the deepest impressions of his life. The reason why the church does
not get and hold the boy of the wage-earner, or any other boy, is
because it stupidly ignores him, his primary interests, and his
essential nature; or goes to the extreme bother of making itself an
insufferable bore.

The reflex influence of boys' work upon the church herself should not be
ignored. Here is a great plant moldering away in silence. Not to mention
the auditorium, even the Sunday-school quarters and lecture-room are
very little used, and this in communities trained to sharp economic
insight and insisting already that the public-school buildings be made
to serve the people both day and night and in social as well as
educational lines.

The basement is perhaps the most vulnerable point in the armor of
exclusive sanctity that encases the church. Here, if anywhere, organized
church work for boys may be tolerated. Whenever it is, lights begin to
shine from the basement windows several evenings a week, a noisy
enthusiasm echoes through the ghostly spaces above, in a literal and
figurative sense cobwebs are brushed away. The stir is soon felt by the
whole church. A sense of usefulness and self-confidence begins to
possess the minds of the members. Things are doing; and the dignity and
desirability of having some part in an institution where things are
doing inspires the members and attracts non-members.

It will be a sad day for the pastor and the church when they agree to
delegate to any other institution all organized work for boys and
especially those features which the boys themselves most enjoy. The
ideal ministry to boyhood must not be centralized away from the church
nor taken altogether out of the hands of the pastor. There is no place
where the work can be done in a more personal way, and with less danger
of subordinating the interests of the individual boy to mammoth
institutional machinery and ambition, than in the church. The numerous
small groups in the multitude of churches afford unequaled opportunity
for intimate friendship, which was pre-eminently the method of Jesus,
and for the full play of a man's influence upon boy character.

The pastor who abdicates, and whose church is but a foraging ground for
other institutions which present a magnificent exhibit of social
service, may, indeed, be a good man, but he is canceling the charter of
the church of tomorrow. It is at best a close question as to how the
church will emerge from her present probation, and the pastor should be
wise enough to reckon with the estimate in which the community and the
boy hold him and the organization that he serves. And if he wants
business men of the future who will respect and support the church,
laboring men who will love and attend the church, professional men who
will believe in and serve an efficient church, he must get the boys who
are to be business men, wage-earners, and professional men, and he must
hold them.

If he is concerned that there should be strong, capable men to take up
the burden of church leadership in the future let him create such
leadership in his own spiritual image from the plastic idealism of
boyhood. Let the hero-worship age, without a word of compulsion or
advice, make its choice with him present as a sample of what the
minister can be, and tomorrow there will be no lack of virile high-class
men in pulpit and parish. As a rule the ideals that carry men into the
ministry are born, not in later youth nor in maturity, but in the period
covered by the early high-school years; and the future leadership of the
church is secure if the right kind of ministers mingle with boys of that
age on terms of unaffected friendship and wholesome community of
interest.

Then too there are the riches of memory and gratitude that bulk so large
in a true pastor's reward. If in the years to come the minister wishes
to warm his heart in the glow of happy memories and undying gratitude,
let him invest his present energy in the service of boys. If the
minister could but realize the vast significance of such work, if he
could feel the lure of those untold values lying like continents on the
edge of the future awaiting discovery and development, if he could but
know that he is swinging incipient forces of commanding personality into
their orbits, directing destiny for the individual, predetermining for
righteousness great decisions of the future, laying hold of the very
kingdoms of this world for Christ, he surely would never again bemean
himself in his own thought nor discount his peerless calling.

To be sure, there are certain satisfactions that a minister may lose all
too quickly in these days. The spell of his eloquence may soon pass; the
undivided love of all the people is no permanent tenure of him who
speaks the truth even in love; speedy dissatisfaction and unbridled
criticism are, alas, too often the practice of church democracy; but
that man who has won the love of boys has thrown about himself a
bodyguard whose loyalty will outmatch every foe.

In the hour of reaction from intense and unrewarded toil the empty
chambers of the preacher's soul may echo in bitterness the harsh
misanthropy of a scheming world. Then it is that he needs the boys, the
undismayed defenders of his faith. Let him name their names until the
ague goes out of his heart and the warm compassion of the Man of Galilee
returns. To be a hero and an ideal in the estimate of anyone is indeed a
great call to the best that is in us; and when the minister, in the dark
day or the bright, hears the acclaim of his bodyguard let him believe
that it is the call of God to manhood that has the triple strength of
faith, hope, and love.

All of this and much more they surely can and will do for him, and if
the pastor who thinks that he has no field or who is getting a bit weary
or professional in the routine ministry to unromantic middle life could
but behold within his parish, however small, this very essence of vital
reality, this allurement of unbounded possibility, this challenge of a
lively paganism, and this greatest single opportunity to bring in the
Kingdom of God, he would, in the very discovery of the boy and his
significance, re-create himself into a more useful, happy, and genuine
man. Is it not better to find new values in the old field than to pursue
superficial values in a succession of new fields?



CHAPTER II

AN APPROACH TO BOYHOOD[1]


If the minister is to do intelligent work with boys he must have some
knowledge of the ground plan of boyhood and he must believe that the boy
both demands and merits actual study. Specific acquaintance with each
one severally, alert recognition of individuality, variety, and even
sport, and an ample allowance for exceptions to every rule will greatly
aid in giving fitness to one's endeavor; but beneath all of these
architectural peculiarities lies the common biological foundation. To
know the human organism genetically, to have some knowledge of the
processes by which it reaches its normal organization, to appreciate the
crude and elemental struggle that has left its history in man's bodily
structure, to think in large biological terms that include, besides "the
physics and chemistry of living matter," considerations ethnological,
hereditary, and psychological, is to make fundamental preparation for
the understanding of boyhood.

For the family to which the boy belongs is the human family. His parents
alone and their characteristics do not explain him, nor does
contemporary environment, important as that is. His ancestry is the
human race, his history is their history, his impulses and his bodily
equipment from which they spring are the result of eons of strife,
survival, and habit. Four generations back he has not two but sixteen
parents. Thus he comes to us out of the great physical democracy of
mankind and doubtless with a tendency to re-live its ancient and
deep-seated experiences.

This theory of race recapitulation as applied to the succeeding stages
of boyhood may be somewhat more poetic than scientific. Genetically he
does those things for which at the time he has the requisite muscular
and nervous equipment, but the growth of this equipment gives him a
series of interests and expressions that run in striking parallel to
primitive life. If the enveloping society is highly civilized and
artificial, much of his primitive desire may be cruelly smothered or too
hastily refined or forced into a criminal course. But memory,
experience, observation, and experiment force one to note that the
parallel does exist and that it is vigorously and copiously attested by
the boy's likes and deeds. At the same time the theory is to be used
suggestively rather than dogmatically, and the leader of boys will not
imagine that to reproduce the primitive life is the goal of his
endeavor. It is by the recognition of primitive traits and by connecting
with them as they emerge that the guide of boyhood may secure an
intelligent and well-supported advance.

Such an approach favors a sympathetic understanding of the boy. To
behold in him a rough summary of the past, and to be able to capitalize
for good the successive instincts as they appear, is to accomplish a
fine piece of missionary work without leaving home. Africa and Borneo
and Alaska come to you. The fire-worshiper of ancient times, the fierce
tribesman, the savage hunter and fisher, the religion-making nomad, the
daring pirate, the bedecked barbarian, the elemental fighter with nature
and fellow and rival of every kind, the master of the world in
making--comes before you in dramatic and often pathetic array in the
unfolding life of the ordinary boy.

Our topmost civilization, although sustained and repleted by this
original stuff, takes all too little account of these elemental traits.
In the growing boy the ascending races are piled one on top of another.
In him you get a longitudinal section of human nature since its
beginning. He is an abridged volume on ethnology; and because he is on
the way up and elected to rule, it is more of a mistake to neglect him
than it is to neglect any of those races that have suffered a
long-continued arrest at some point along the way. Of course anyone
expecting to note by day and hour the initial emergence of this or that
particular trait of primitive man will be disappointed. The thing for
the friend of the boy to know is that in him the deep-set habits which
made the human body the instrument it is, the old propensities of savage
life are voices of the past, muffled, perhaps, but very deep and
insistent, calling him to do the things which for ages were done and to
make full trial of the physique which modern civilization threatens with
disuse or perversion.

[Illustration: MIGHTY HUNTERS]

[Illustration: THE LURE OF THE WATER]

Let a number of the common traits of boyhood testify. There is the gang
instinct which is noticeably dominant during the years from twelve to
fifteen. Probably 80 per cent of all boys of this age belong to some
group answering dimly to ancient tribal association and forming the
first social circle outside the home. A canvass of the conditions of boy
life in the Hyde Park district of Chicago revealed the existence of such
gangs on an average of one to every two blocks, and the situation is not
materially different in other parts of the city or in the smaller towns.
The gang is thus the initial civic experiment for better or for worse,
the outreach after government, co-operative power, and the larger self
which can be found only in association. During this age and within his
group the boy does not act as one possessing clear and independent moral
responsibility. He acts as part of the gang, subject to its ideals, and
practically helpless against its codes of conduct and its standards of
loyalty.

One hot afternoon I ran across a group "in swimming" at a forbidden spot
on the shore of Lake Michigan. As we talked and tended the fire, which
their sun-blistered bodies did not need, one of the lads suddenly fired
at me point-blank the all-important question, "What do you belong to?"
Being unable to give an answer immediately favorable to our growing
friendship, I countered with "What do _you_ belong to?" "Oh," said he,
"I belong to de gang." "What gang?" "De gang on de corner of Fitty Fit
and Cottage Grove." "And what do you do?" "Ah, in de ev'nin' we go out
and ketch guys and tie 'em up." Allowing for nickel-show and Wild-West
suggestions, there remains a touch of a somewhat primitive exploit.

Another interesting gang was found occupying a cave in the saloon
district of Lake Avenue. The cave takes precedence over the shack as a
rendezvous because it demands no building material and affords more
secrecy. Beneath the cave was a carefully concealed seven-foot
sub-cellar which they had also excavated. This served as a guardhouse
for unruly members and as a hiding-place for loot. When in conclave,
each boy occupied his space on a bench built against the sides of the
cave, his place being indicated by his particular number on the mud
wall. This gang had forty-eight members and was led by a dissolute
fellow somewhat older than the others, one of those dangerous boys
beyond the age of compulsory education and unfitted for regular work.
They played cards, "rushed the can," and all hands smoked cigarettes.
_Facilis descensus Averno._ The love of adventure and hunting was
illustrated in the case of two other boys of this neighborhood who were
but ten and eleven years of age. Having stolen eleven dollars and a
useless revolver, they ran away to Milwaukee. When taken in hand by the
police of that city they solemnly declared that they had "come to
Wisconsin to shoot Injuns."

Much could be said of the love of fire which has not yet surrendered all
of its charm for even the most unromantic adult. The mystic thrill that
went through the unspoiled nerves of pre-historic man and filled his
mind with awe is with us still. The boy above all others yields to its
spell. Further, by means of a fire he becomes, almost without effort, a
wonderworking cause, a manipulator of nature, a miracle worker. Hence
the vacant lots are often lighted up; barrels, boxes, and fences
disappear; and one almost believes that part of the charm of smoking is
in the very making of the smoke and seeing it unwind into greater
mystery as did incense from thousands of altars in the long-ago.

This elemental desire to be a cause and to advertise by visible,
audible, and often painful proofs the fact of one's presence in the
world is also basal. It is the compliment which noisy childhood and
industrious boyhood insistently demand from the world about. Even the
infant revels in this testimony,  preferring crude and noisy playthings
of proportion to the innocent nerve-sparing devices which the adult
tries to foist upon him. The coal scuttle is made to proclaim causal
relation between the self in effort and the not-self in response more
satisfactorily than the rag doll; and the manifest glee over the
contortions of the playful father whose hand is slapped is not innate
cruelty but the delight of successful experiment in causation.

So of the noise and bluster, the building and destruction, the teasing
and torture so often perpetrated by the boy. He is saying that he is
here and must be reckoned with, and he wishes to make his presence as
significant as possible. If home, school, and community conditions are
such as to give healthful direction to both his constructive and
destructive experimentation, all is well, but if society cannot so
provide he will still exploit his causal relation although it must be in
violation of law and order. The result is delinquency, but even in this
he glories. It often gives a more pungent and romantic testimony than
could otherwise be secured. It is the flaring yellow advertisement of
misdirected effectiveness. Probably there mingles with this impulse the
love of adventure as developed in the chase.  "Flipping cars,"
tantalizing policemen, pilfering from fruit stands are frequently the
degenerate, urban forms of the old quest of, and encounter with, the
game of forest and jungle.

Then there is the lure of the water, which explains more than half his
school truancy during the open season. It is a fine spring or summer
day. The _Wanderlust_ of his ancestry is upon the boy. The periodic
migration for game or with the herds, the free range of wood and stream,
or the excitement of the chase pulsates in his blood. Voices of the far
past call to something native in him. The shimmer of the water just as
they of old saw it, the joyous chance of taking game from its unseen
depths, or of getting the full flush of bodily sensation by plunging
into it, the unbridled pursuit of one's own sweet will under the free
air of heaven--these are the attractions over against which we place the
school with its books, its restraint, and its feminine control; and the
church with its hush and its Sunday-school lesson: and, too often, we
offer nothing else. It is like giving a hungry woodchopper a doily, a
Nabisco wafer, and a finger-bowl.

If we could but appreciate the great crude past whose conflicts still
persist in the boy's gruesome and tragic dreams, filling him with a
fear of the dark, which fear in time past was the wholesome and
necessary monitor of self-preservation; if we could only realize how
strenuous must be those experiences which guarantee a strong body, a
firm will, and an appetite for objective facts, we would not make our
education so insipidly nice, so intellectual, so bookish, and so much
under the roof. A school and a school building are not synonymous, a
church and a church building are not synonymous; schooling is not
identical with education, nor church attendance with religion. It is
unfortunate if the boy beholds in these two essential institutions
merely an emasculated police.

If either the church or the school is to reach the boy it will have to
recognize and perform its task very largely beyond the traditional
limits of the institution as such, and with a heartiness and masculinity
which are now often absent. In this field the indirect and
extra-ecclesiastical work of the minister will be his best work, and the
time that the teacher spends with his pupils outside the schoolhouse may
have more educational value than that spent within. In due time society
will be ready to appreciate and support the educator who is bigger than
any building; and outdoor schools are bound to grow in favor.

[Illustration: GETTING THE SPARK]

[Illustration: GETTING THE FLAME]

[Illustration: FIRE!]

Consider also the boy's love of paraphernalia and all the tokens of
achievement or of oneness with his group. The pre-adolescent boy
glorying in full Indian regalia, the early-adolescent proud in the suit
of his team or in his accouterments as a Scout, and a little later, with
quieter taste, the persistent fraternity pin--all of these tell the same
story of the love of insignia and the power of the emblem in the social
control and development of youth. Think also of the collecting mania,
which among primitives was less strong than is ordinarily supposed, but
which in early boyhood reaches forth its hands, industriously, if not
always wisely, after concrete, tactual knowledge and proprietorship. So
also with the impulse to tussle and to revel in the excitement of a
contest; inhibited, it explodes; neglected, it degenerates; but directed
it goes far toward the making of a man. Evidence of this intensity,
zest, and pressure of young life is never wanting. Disorder
"rough-house," and even serious accidents, testify to the reckless
abandon which tries to compensate in brief space for a thousand hours of
repression. Such occurrences are unfortunate but worse things may happen
if the discharge of energy becomes anti-social, immoral, and vicious.
"The evils of lust and drink are the evils that devour playless and
inhibited youth."

Right conceptions of religion and education must therefore attach an
added sanctity to the growth of the body, since in and through it alone
is the soul, so far as we know it, achieved. To accept the biological
order as of God and to turn to their right use all of life's unfolding
powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive
instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and
operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized
virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs.
Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in
a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything
that characterizes the boy, however bothersome and unpromising it may
seem, is to be considered with reference to a developing organism which
holds the story of the past and the prophecy of the future. To the
apostle of the largest vision and the greatest hope, these native
propensities will be the call of the man of Macedonia, saying, "Come
over and help us."

The most striking biological change that comes to the boy on his way to
manhood is that of puberty. The church and the state have attested the
vast importance of this experience for political and religious ends by
their ceremonials of induction into the responsibilities of citizenship
and the obligations of formal religion. Among the least civilized
peoples these ceremonies were often cruel, superstitious, and long drawn
out in their exaction of self-control, sacrifice, and subordination to
the tribal will. The sagacity of the elders of the tribe in preserving
their own control and in perpetuating totemic lore must compel the
unfeigned admiration of the modern ethnologist.

The Athenians with their magnificent civilization exalted citizenship
and the service of the state far beyond any modern attainment. The way
of the youth today is tame, empty, and selfish as compared with the
Spartan road to manhood and the Roman ceremonies attendant upon the
assumption of the _toga virilis_. As a rule modern churches have too
lightly regarded the profound significance of ancient confirmation
services--Jewish, Greek, and Catholic. Knowledge of what transpires in
the body and mind of adolescence proves the wisdom of the ancients and
at the same time attracts both the educator and the evangelist to study
and use the crises of this fertile and plastic period.

The process of transformation from childhood into manhood begins in the
twelfth or thirteenth year, passes its most acute stage at about
fifteen, and may not complete itself until the twenty-fifth year. It is
preceded by a period of mobilization of vitality as if nature were
preparing for this wonderful re-birth whereby the individualistic boy
becomes the socialized progenitor of his kind.

The normal physiological changes, quite apart from their psychological
accompaniments, are such as to elicit the sympathy of intelligent
adults. Early in pubescent growth the heart increases by leaps and
bounds, often doubling its size in the course of two years or even one
year. There is a rise of about one degree in the temperature of the
blood and the blood pressure is increased in all parts of the body. The
entire body is unduly sensitized, and the boy is besieged by an army of
new and vivid sense impressions that overstimulate, confuse, and baffle
him. He is under stress and like all persons under tension he reacts
extremely and hence inconsistently in different directions. He cannot
correlate and organize his experiences. They are too vivid, varied, and
rapid for that. This over-intensity begets in turn excessive languor and
he cannot hold himself in _via media_.

His physical condition explains his marked moods: his sudden changes of
front, his ascent of rare heights of impulsive idealism, and his equally
sudden descent into the bogs of materialism; his unsurpassed though
temporary altruism and his intermittent abandon to gross selfishness. He
has range. He is a little more than himself in every direction. The wine
of life is in his blood and brain. It is no wonder that somewhere about
the middle of the adolescent period both conversions and misdemeanors
are at their maximum.

To make matters worse these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply
because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single
clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and
chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is
swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams.
One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The
ego which must gauge itself by external bearings is temporarily adrift
and lost. Suicidal thoughts are easily evoked; and at such times the
luxury of being odd and hopelessly misunderstood constitutes a
chameleon-like morbidity that, with a slight change of light and color,
becomes an obsession of conceit. The odd one, the mystery to self and
others, is he not the great one that shall occupy the center of the
stage in some stupendous drama? A man now prominent in educational
circles testifies how that on a drizzly night on the streets of old
London the lad, then but sixteen years of age, came to a full stop, set
his foot down with dramatic pose, and exclaimed with soul-wracking
seriousness:

    The time is out of joint;--O cursed spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!

So is it ever with the adolescent soul unless society curses the desire
for significance and makes it criminal.

These bare cliffs of primal personality have not yet undergone the
abrasion of the glacial drift nor of the frost and the heat, the wind
and the rain of long years. They are angular, bold, defiant, and
unsuited to the pastoral and agricultural scenes of middle life. The
grind of life with its slow accomplishment and failure has not as yet
imparted caution and discretion. Shrewd calculation and niggardliness
too are normally absent. Generous estimates prevail. Idealism is
passionate and turns its eye to summits that a life-time of devotion
cannot scale. Honor is held in high regard and select friendships may
have the intensity of religion. Judgments are without qualification.
Valor, laughter and fun, excess and the love of victory mingle in hot
profusion. Except in the case of the precocious boy of the street, the
cold vices of cynicism, misanthropy, and avarice--the reptilians of
society--are found almost exclusively among adults. The _younger_
brother is the prodigal. Experience has not taught him how to value
property and the main chance.

The failure of self-knowledge and self-control to keep pace with the
rapid changes of bodily structure, sense-impressions, and mental
organization is nowhere more marked and significant than in sex
development; and the common experience of adolescent boys is to the
effect that no other temptations equal in persistence and intensity
those that attend and follow this awakening. It is highly important,
then, that, as preparation for dealing with the individual, the minister
shall both see the generic boy upon the background of the past and that
he shall also understand in some measure the physical basis and
psychological ferment of the boy's inevitable re-birth, not for the
purpose of cheaply exploiting adolescence but in order that he may bring
every life to its best in terms of personal character and of worth to
the world.



CHAPTER III

THE BOY IN VILLAGE AND COUNTRY[2]


From the consideration of bodily health the village boy is better off
than his city cousin. He also enjoys to a far greater degree the
protective and educative attention of real neighborhood life. The
opinions and customs which help to mold him are more personal. He
probably holds himself more accountable, for he can more readily trace
the results of any course of action in terms of the welfare and
good-will of well-known persons. His relation to nature is also more
nearly ideal. Artificial restrictions, territorial and otherwise, are
not so strictly imposed. His lot favors a sane and normal view of life.
There are more chores to be done, more inviting occupations in the open,
and altogether there may be a more wholesome participation in the work
of maintaining the home than is possible for the city boy.

On the other hand, the static character of village life leaves the boy
with little inspiration in his primary interests of play and his serious
ideals of the noblest manhood. Idle hours work demoralization and the
ever-present example of the village loafer is not good. A
disproportionate number of village people lack public spirit and social
ideals. The masculine element most in evidence is not of the strongest
and most inspiring kind, and the village is all too often the paradise
of the loafer and the male gossip. This, however, cannot be said of the
small frontier town where the spirit of progress is grappling with crude
conditions.

Furthermore, the village is sadly incompetent in the organization of its
welfare and community work. As a matter of fact, social supervision is
often so lax that obscene moving pictures and cards that are driven out
of the large cities are exhibited without protest in the small towns.
Usually the village is overchurched, and consequently divided into
pitiably weak factions whose controlling aim is self-preservation.
Seldom can a religious, philanthropic, or social organization be
developed with sufficient strength to serve the community as such.

The sectarian divisions which in the vast needs and resources of great
cities do not so acutely menace church efficiency prove serious in the
small town. The saloon, poolroom, livery stable, and other haunts of the
idle are open for boys; but the Christian people, because of their
denominational differences, maintain no social headquarters and no
institution in which boys may find healthy expression for their normal
interests. The Y.M.C.A. is impracticable, because the church people are
already overtaxed in keeping up their denominational competition and so
cannot contribute enough to run an association properly. Wherever an
association cannot be conducted by trained and paid officers it will
result in disappointment.

The caricature of essential Christianity which is afforded by the
denominational exhibit in the village works great harm to boys. It is
not only that they are deprived of that guidance which true Christianity
would give them, but they are confronted from the first with a spectacle
of pettiness, jealousy, and incompetency which they will probably
forever associate with Christianity, at least in its ecclesiastical
forms. Villages are at best sufficiently susceptible to those
unfortunate human traits that make for clique and cleavage in society,
and when the Christian church, instead of unifying and exalting the
community life, adds several other divisive interests with all the
authority of religion, the hope of intelligent, united, and effective
service for the community, on a scale that would arouse the imagination
and enlist the good-will of all right-minded people, is made sadly
remote.

So far as church work is concerned, the village boy is likely to be
overlooked, as promising little toward the immediate financial support
of the church and the increase of membership. In the brief interval of
two years--the average duration of the village pastorate--it does not
seem practicable for the minister to go about a work which will require
a much longer time to produce those "satisfactory results" for which
churches and missionary boards clamor. A revival effort which inflates
the membership-roll, strenuous and ingenious endeavors to increase the
offerings, are the barren makeshifts of a policy which does not see the
distinct advantage and security in building Christian manhood from the
foundation up.

It must not be thought that the minister is largely to blame for the
situation as it now is. Perpetuating institutions beyond the time of
their usefulness is one of society's worst habits, and it is not to be
expected that religious organizations,  which in a given stage of the
development of Christian truths were vital and necessary, can easily be
persuaded to surrender their identity, even after the cause that called
them into being has been won.

    Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
    Of that which once was great has passed away.

But the real religious leader who loves boys will not be balked by the
pettiness and inability of denominationalism. His hope lies not solely
in the church or the churches, but largely in the intelligence,
sympathy, and generosity of the unchurched citizens, whose number and
importance in the small town is probably in the inverse ratio of the
number of churches. Business men of whatever creed, or of none, are
remarkably responsive to any sane endeavor to create a wholesome outlet
for juvenile activity, and, whether right or wrong, count such efforts
as being more valuable than much of the traditional church endeavor.

The minister will first try to organize boys' work for the whole
community, but if co-operation on the part of all or of a group of the
churches proves impossible, let him go ahead with such assistance as his
own church and other voluntary supporters will afford, and let him still
work in entire freedom from sectarian aim. As a minister of Christ and
his kingdom he must give to Christianity an interpretation which will
offset provincial and narrow impressions. He must free it from cant and
from the other-worldly emphasis and bring it into the realm where boys
and business men will respect it as a social factor of primary
importance.

All the problems of early adolescence belong to the village boy as to
every other. He also gropes about for his vocational discovery. How
shall he gain self-control, how can he find himself? How can he relate
his life to the great perplexing world and to the God of all? How can he
win his immediate battles with temptation? The public school throws
little light upon his possible occupation, trade, or profession, nor
does it deal with his moral struggle.

The Sunday school, if it touches him at all, is often regarded as a
nuisance to be endured out of respect for others. It addresses itself
too much to tradition and too little to modern life. It gets the
Israelites from Egypt into possession of Canaan by various miraculous
interventions, stops the sea and the sun, knocks down the walls of
Jericho by the most uncommon tactics, and reveals the umpire as on the
Israelites' side.

The boy knows that if this be intended as sober history things have
changed somewhat. For these are the very things that do not and should
not happen in the conquest of his promised land. Under Christian
guidance he must learn the ethical value of an orderly world, the
morality that inheres in cause and effect, the divine help which is not
partiality; and if it should turn out that he could master these lessons
better through work and play and friendship than through being formally
instructed in misapprehended lore, then such work and play and
fellowship will prove of greater value than the Sunday-school hour
alone.

As for the country boy, perhaps his chief lack is association with his
fellows. To meet this and to satisfy the gregarious instinct, which will
be found in him as in all boys, the minister's organizing ability must
be directed. The gymnasium, in so far as it is a makeshift for lack of
proper exercise in the life of the city boy, is not in great demand in
the country. The farm boy has in his work plenty of exercise of a
general and sufficiently exhausting character, and he has the benefit of
taking it out of doors. He, of course, is not a gymnast in fineness and
grace of development, and he may need corrective exercises, but the big
muscles whose development tells for health and against nervousness are
always well used.

In so far, however, as the gymnasium affords a place for organized
indoor play through the winter months there is more to be said of its
necessity. For it is not exercise but group play that the country boy
most needs. The fun and excitement, the contest and the co-ordination of
his ability with that of others, all serve to reduce his awkwardness and
to supplant a rather painful self-consciousness with a more just idea of
his relative rating among his fellows. He finds himself, learns what it
is to pull together, and gets some idea of the problems of getting along
well with colleagues and opponents.

Wherever the country pastor can secure a room that will do for
basket-ball, indoor baseball, and the like, he may, if it is
sufficiently central and accessible, perform a useful service for the
boys and establish a point of contact. It is highly desirable that
shower-baths and conveniences for a complete change of clothing be
provided. If Saturday afternoon is a slack time and the farmers are
likely to come to the village, he should make arrangements to care for
the boys then, reserving Saturday evening for the young men. Such an
arrangement secures economy in heating the building and may overcome for
some of the youth the Saturday evening attractions of the saloon and
public dance.

For the distinctly country church, situated at the cross-roads, a
building that may serve as a gymnasium will be practically impossible
unless a very remarkable enthusiasm is awakened among the boys and young
men. But in many a country village such an equipment is both necessary
and well within the reach of a good organizer. The country people have
means and know how to work for what they really desire. What they most
lack is inspiration and leadership.

During that part of the open season when school is in session the
country minister has an excellent opportunity to meet the boys, organize
their play, and become a real factor in their lives. In the country
one-room school there will be found but few boys over fourteen years of
age, but a great deal can be done with the younger boys in some such way
as follows: As school "lets out" in the afternoon the minister is on
hand. The boys have been under a woman teacher all day and are glad to
meet a man who will lead them in vigorous play. It may be baseball,
football, trackwork with relay races, military drill, or the like--all
they need is one who knows how, who is a recognized leader, and who
serves as an immediate court of appeal. If they do not get more moral
benefit and real equipment for life's struggle in this hour and a half
than they are likely to get from a day's bookwork in the average
one-room, all-grades, girl-directed country school, it must be because
the minister is a sorry specimen.

The city minister takes his boys on outings to the country. The country
minister will bring his boys on "innings" to the city. As they see him
he is pre-eminently the apostle of that stirring, larger world. What
abilities may not be awakened, what horizons that now settle about the
neighboring farm or village may not be gloriously lifted and broadened,
what riches that printed page cannot convey may not be planted in the
young mind by the pastor who introduces country boys to their first
glimpse of great universities, gigantic industries, famous libraries,
inspiring churches, and stately buildings of government?

One need not mention such possibilities as taking a group to the fair or
the circus, or on expeditions for fishing, swimming, and hunting--all
of them easy roads to immortality in a boy's affection.

Further, the minister is not only the apostle of that greater world but
the exemplar of the highest culture. He is to bring that culture to the
country not only through his own person but by lectures on art and
literature, so that the young may participate in the world's refined and
imperishable wealth. This may mean illustrated lectures on art and the
distribution of good prints which will gradually supplant the chromos
and gaudy advertisements which often hold undisputed sway on the walls
of the farmhouse.

It might also be helpful to our partly foreign rural population to have
lectures on history such as will acquaint boys and others with the real
heroes of various nations, preserve pride in the best national
traditions, and ultimately develop a sane and sound patriotism among all
our citizens. The church building is not too sacred a place for an
endeavor of this kind. The ordinary stereopticon and the moving picture
should not be disdained in so good a cause. Boys are hero-worshipers,
and history is full of heroes of first-rate religious significance.

As a further factor in elevating and enriching the life of the country
boy, the minister may endeavor to create a taste for good reading. The
tendency is that all the serious reading shall be along agricultural
rather than cultural lines and that the lighter reading shall be only
the newspaper and the trashy story. The minister should enlarge the
boy's life by acquainting him with the great classics. A taste for good
things should be formed early. With the older boys, from the years of
sixteen or eighteen upward, organization for literary development and
debating should be tried. A good deal in a cultural way is necessary to
offset the danger which now besets the successful farmer of becoming a
slave to money-making, after the fashion of the great magnates whom he
condemns but with rather less of their general perspective of life.

The minister might help organize a mock trial, county council, school
board, state legislature, or something of that sort, as a social and
educative device for the older boys. Under certain conditions music
could well form the fundamental bond of association, and groups gathered
about such interests as these could meet from house to house, thus
promoting the social life of the parish in no small degree. Young women
might well share in the organizations that are literary and musical. The
great vogue of the country singing-school a generation ago was no mere
accident.

Could not the minister enter into the campaign for the improvement of
the conditions of farm life and stimulate the beautifying of the
dooryards by giving a prize to the boy who, in the judgment of an
impartial committee, had excelled in this good work? Could he not
interest his boys' organization in beautifying the church grounds and so
enlist them in a practical altruistic endeavor? Might he not find a very
vital point of contact with the country boy by conducting institutes for
farmers' boys, perhaps once a month, in which by the generous use of
government bulletins and by illustration and actual experiment he might
awaken a scientific interest in farming and impart valuable information?
In connection with this the boys could be induced to conduct experiments
on plots of ground on their fathers' farms. Exhibits could be made at
the church and prizes awarded. It would be a good thing too if the
profits, or part of the profits, from such experimental plots could be
voluntarily devoted to some philanthropic or religious cause. This would
have the double value of performing an altruistic act and of
intelligently canvassing the claim of some recognized philanthropy. So
also the raising of chickens and stock might be tried in a limited way
with the scientific method and the philanthropic purpose combined.

[Illustration: BOY SCOUTS STUDYING THE TREES]

In some places botanical collections can be made of great interest; or
the gathering and polishing of all the kinds of wood in the vicinity,
with an exhibition in due time, may appeal to the boys. In addition to
forestry there is ornithology, geology, and, for the early age of twelve
to fifteen, bows and arrows, crossbows, scouting, and various
expeditions answering to the adventure instinct.

The wise country minister will certainly keep in touch with the public
school, will be seen there frequently, and will give his genuine support
to the teacher in all of her endeavor to do a really noble work with a
very limited outfit. He will help her to withstand the gross
utilitarianism of the average farmer, who is slow to believe in anything
for today that cannot be turned into dollars tomorrow. What with the
consolidation of township schools, improved communication by rural
delivery and telephone, better roads, the increasing use of automobiles,
and the rising interest in rural life generally, together with a broad
view of pastoral leadership and the "cure of souls" for the whole
countryside, the minister may be a vital factor in shaping the social
and religious life of the country boy; and he will, because of his
character and office, illumine common needs and homely interests with an
ever-refined and spiritual ideal. His ministry, however, cannot be all
top, a cloudland impalpable and fleeting. It was with common footing and
vital ties that Goldsmith's village preacher

     Allured to brighter worlds and led the way.

After such fashion and with thorough rootage in country life must the
minister of today turn to spiritual account the wealth-producing methods
of farming. Out of soil cultivation he must guarantee soul culture by
setting forth in person, word, and institution those ideals which have
always claimed some of the best boyhood of the country for the world's
great tasks.



CHAPTER IV

THE MODERN CITY AND THE NORMAL BOY[3]


Modern cities have been built to concentrate industrial opportunity.
They have taken their rise and form subsequent to the industrial
revolution wrought by steam and as a result of that revolution. So far
they have paid only minor attention to the conservation or improvement
of human life. Justice, not to mention mercy, toward the family and the
individual has not been the guiding star. The human element has been
left to fit as best it could into a system of maximum production at
minimum cost, rapid and profitable transportation, distribution
calculated to emphasize and exploit need, and satisfactory dividends on
what was often supposititious stock; and because these have been the
main considerations the latent and priceless wealth of boyhood has been
largely sacrificed.

The amazing and as yet unchecked movement of population toward the city
means usually a curtailment of living area for all concerned.  The more
people per acre the greater the limitation of individual action and the
greater the need of self-control and social supervision. Restrictions of
all sorts are necessary for the peace of a community wherein the
physical conditions almost force people to jostle and irritate one
another. In such a situation the more spontaneous and unconventional the
expression of life the greater the danger of bothering one's neighbors
and of conflicting with necessary but artificial restrictions. Even
innocent failure to comprehend the situation may constitute one
anti-social or delinquent, and the foreigner as well as the boy is often
misjudged in this way.

But on the score of the city's inevitable "Thou shalt not," it is the
boy who suffers more than any other member of the community. His
intensely motor propensities, love of adventure, dim idea of modern
property rights, and the readiness with which he merges into the
stimulating and mischief-loving "gang" operate to constitute him the
peerless nuisance of the congested district, the scourge of an
exasperated and neurasthenic public, the enemy of good order and private
rights.

Hence juvenile delinquency and crime increase proportionately with the
crowding of the modern city, the boy offending five times to the girl's
once, and directing 80 per cent of his misdemeanors against property
rights. In the city of Chicago alone the 1909 records show that in one
year there passed through the courts 3,870 children under seventeen
years of age, 10,449 under twenty years, and 25,580 under twenty-five
years of age. But it is not the actual delinquency of which the law
takes account that most impresses one; it is rather the weight of
failure and mediocrity, the host of "seconds" and "culls" that the city
treatment of childhood produces.

The constrictions, vicissitudes, and instability of city life often make
such havoc of the home that the boy is practically adrift at an early
age. He has no abiding-place of sufficient permanency to create a wealth
of association or to develop those loyalties that enrich the years and
serve as anchorage in the storms of life. He moves from one flat to
another every year, and in many cases every six months. In such a
kaleidoscopic experience the true old-fashioned neighbor, whose
charitable judgment formerly robbed the law of its victims, is sadly
missed. Formerly allowance was made out of neighborly regard for the
parents of bothersome boys, but among the flat-dwellers of today
proximity means alienation, familiarity breeds contempt, and far from
being neighbors, those who live across the hall or above or below are
aggrieved persons who have to put up with the noise of an unknown rascal
whose parents, like themselves, occupy temporarily these restricted
quarters--these homes attenuated beyond recognition.

A garden plot, small live stock, pets, woodpile, and workshop are all
out of the question, for the city has deprived the average boy not only
of fit living quarters but of the opportunity to enact a fair part of
his glorious life-drama within the friendly atmosphere of home. He
cannot collect things with a view to proprietorship and construction and
have them under his own roof. The noise and litter incident to building
operations of such proportions as please boys will not be tolerated.
Moreover, this home, which has reached the vanishing point, makes almost
no demand for his co-operation in its maintenance. There are no chores
for the flat boy wherein he may be busy and dignified as a partner in
the family life. To make the flat a little more sumptuous and call it an
apartment does not solve the problem, and with the rapid decrease of
detached houses and the occupation of the territory with flat buildings
the city is providing for itself a much more serious juvenile problem
than it now has.

But the industrial usurpation takes toll of the family in other ways.
The intense economic struggle and the long distance "to work" rob the
boy of the father's presence and throw upon the mother an unjust burden.
To return home late and exhausted, to be hardly equal to the economic
demand, to see the prenuptial ideals fade, to pass from disappointment
to discouragement and from chronic irritability to a broken home is not
uncommon. The boy is unfortunate if the "incompatibility" end in
desertion or divorce, and equally unfortunate if it does not.

Owing to the fact that the male usually stands from under when the home
is about to collapse, and to the further fact that industrial accidents,
diseases, and fatalities in the city claim many fathers, there
frequently falls upon the mother the undivided burden of a considerable
family. If she goes out to work the children are neglected; if she takes
roomers family life of the kind that nurtures health and morality is at
an end. And just as the apparently fortunate boy of the apartment is
forced upon the street, so the boy from the overcrowded old-fashioned
house is pushed out by the roomers who must have first attention because
of bread-and-butter considerations. Much more could be said of all the
various kinds of neglect, misfortune, and avarice that commit boys to
the doubtful influences of the city street, but the main object is to
point out the trend of home life in the modern city without denying that
there are indeed many adequate homes still to be found, especially in
suburban districts.

A survey of the street and its allied institutions will throw light upon
the precocious ways of the typical city boy. The street is the
playground, especially of the small boy who must remain within sight and
call of home. Numerous fatalities, vigorous police, and big recreation
parks will not prevent the instinctive use of the nearest available open
area. If congestion is to be permitted and numerous small parks cannot
be had, then the street must have such care and its play zones must be
so guarded and supervised that the children will be both safe from
danger and healthfully and vigorously employed.

[Illustration: FIND THE PLAYGROUND]

In the busier parts of the city the constant street noise puts a nervous
tax upon the children; the proximity of so many bright and moving
objects taxes the eyes; the splash of gaudy and gross advertisements
creates a fevered imagination; slang, profanity, and vulgarity lend a
smart effect; the merchant's tempting display often leads to theft, and
the immodest dress of women produces an evil effect upon the mind of the
overstimulated adolescent boy; opportunities to elude observation and to
deceive one's parents abound; social control weakens; ideals become
neurotic, flashy, distorted; the light and allurement of the street
encourage late hours; the posters and "barkers" of cheap shows often
appeal to illicit curiosity, and the galaxy of apparent fun and
adventure is such as to tax to the full the wholesome and restraining
influence of even the best home.

The cheap show is an adjunct of the street and a potent educational
factor in the training of the city lad. These motion-picture shows have
an estimated daily patronage in the United States of two and a quarter
millions, and in Chicago 32,000 children will be found in them daily.
Many of these children are helplessly open to suggestion, owing to
malnutrition and the nervous strain which the city imposes; and harmful
impressions received in this vivid way late at night cannot be resisted.
At one time, after a set of pictures had been given on the West Side
which depicted the hero as a burglar, thirteen boys were brought into
court, all of whom had in their possession housebreakers' tools, and all
stated they had invested in these tools because they had seen these
pictures and they were anxious to become gentlemanly burglars.[4]
Through censorship bureaus, national and municipal, the character of the
films put on exhibition is being greatly improved, and the moving
picture is destined to a large use by educational and religious
agencies.

Many instances of valuable moving-picture exhibits come to mind,
including those on travel, nature-study, the passion play, athletic
sports, sanitation (especially the exhibits showing the breeding and
habits of the house-fly), and various others having to do with the
health, happiness, and morality of the people; and from the study of
hundreds of nickel shows one is forced in justice to say that although
there are dangers from the children's being out late at night and going
to such places unattended, and although the recreation is passive and
administered rather than secured by wholesome muscular exercise, yet
there has been brought within the reach of the entire family of moderate
means an evening of innocent enjoyment which may be had together and at
small expense. Properly regulated, it is an offset to the saloon and a
positive medium of good influence.

Such a commendation, however, can safely be made for those communities
only which take the pains to censor all films before exhibition is
permitted. In less than two years the censorship bureau of Chicago has
excluded one hundred and thirteen miles of objectionable films. It
should be said also that the vaudeville, which now often accompanies the
nickel and dime shows, is usually coarse and sometimes immoral. The
music, alas, speaks for itself and constitutes a sorry sort of education
except in the foreign quarters of our great cities where, in conformity
to a better taste, it becomes classic and valuable.

But to describe a typical film of the better sort and to indicate its
practical use may have some suggestive value for wide-awake ministers
who wish to turn to good account every legitimate social agency. During
the Christmas season of 1911 the following film story was set forth to
vast audiences of people with telling effect: In a wretched hovel you
see a lame mother with three pale children. The rich young landlord
comes to collect rent and is implored to improve the place. This he
refuses to do because of his small returns on the property. He departs.
The father of the family returns from work. They eat the bread of the
desolate.

The landlord marries and sets out on an ocean voyage with his bride. On
the same ship the father of the tubercular family, working as stoker or
deck hand, reaches the last stages of the disease and in his dying hours
is mercifully attended by the bride. She contracts the disease and later
appears weak and fading. The husband, ascertaining the real nature of
her malady, brings her home with the purpose of placing her in the
private sanitarium. There is no room in this institution, but good
accommodations are found in the public sanitarium to which she goes and
where she finds the children from their tenement.

The facts have now been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a
change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great
sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness
of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets
forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who
suffer from the great white plague: and this was sufficient for the
crowd, for all are children when beholding the elemental things of life.
At any rate the women who stood at the exits of the theater selling the
Christmas stamps of the anti-tuberculosis society will tell you that the
purse strings as well as the heart strings of the crowd relaxed to the
crude but deep melody of mercy.

The social hunger also, turning its back upon the meager home and
heightened by the monotony and semi-independence of early toil, takes to
the street. The quest is quickly commercialized and debauched by the
public dance halls which are controlled by the liquor interests. A
recent thorough investigation of 328 of these halls in Chicago showed a
nightly attendance of some 86,000 young people, the average age of the
boys being sixteen to eighteen years and of the girls fourteen to
sixteen years. Liquor was sold in 240 halls, 190 had saloons opening
into them, in 178 immoral dancing went on unhindered. The worst halls
had the least dancing and the longest intermissions. Everything was
conducted so as to increase the sale of liquor, and between the hours of
one and three A.M. the toughest element from the saloons, which close
at one o'clock, poured into the halls to complete the debauch and to
make full use of the special liquor license which is good until the
later hour.[5]

The quest of fun and social adventure can be traced also through other
commercialized channels, in public poolrooms where minors waste time and
money--gamble, smoke, tell unclean stories and plan mischief; in great
amusement parks where the boy and girl on pleasure bent meet as
strangers to each other and without social sponsor, where the deluded
girl not only accepts but often invites a generosity which will tend to
compromise if not break down the morality of both; on excursion boats
which, if neglected, tend to become floating palaces of shame; and in
many ways that lead from the inadequate home to sorrow and disaster.

It is to be doubted whether the average pastor or parent has an adequate
conception of the tremendous odds against which the moral forces contend
for the conservation of the city's childhood and youth, and whether we
have as yet begun to solve the problems that arise from the city's
sinister treatment of the home. Public parks, field-houses, libraries,
and social settlements graciously mitigate the evil, but are far from
curing it.

To turn to the public schools with the expectation that they can
immediately, or at length, make good the injury done the home by
industrial usurpation is to expect more than is fair or possible. They
are doing valiantly and well, they are becoming social centers and in
due time they will have more adequately in hand both the vocational and
recreational interests of youth. With this accession of educational
territory will come a proportionate increase in the number of male
teachers, and a further diminution of the fallacy that the only kind of
order is silence and the prime condition of mental concentration
inaction. The system will become less and the boy more important.

But the whole community is the master educator; the best home is not
exempt from its influence nor the best school greatly superior to its
morality. In fact the school, even as the place of amusement and all
places of congregation, serves to diffuse the moral problems of boyhood
throughout the whole mass. Moral sanitation is more difficult than
physical sanitation, and the spoiled boy is a good conductor of various
forms of moral virus. The moral training involved in the ordinary
working of the public school is considerable and is none the less
valuable because it is indirect. With more attention to physical
condition, corrective exercise, and organized play, and with the
motivating of a larger area of school work, the moral value of the
institution will be still further enhanced.

The church addresses itself to the problem in ways both general and
specific, positive and negative. In its stimulation of public
conscience, in its inspiration of those who work directly for improved
conditions, and in Sunday schools and young people's societies, a
contribution of no small value is continually made. A rather negative,
or at best, concessive attitude toward recreation and a disposition to
rest satisfied with the denunciation of harmful institutions and
activities militates against her greatest usefulness. She must rather
compensate for home shortages and compete with the doubtful allurements
of the city. This she may do in part within her own plant and in part by
encouraging and supporting all wholesome outlets for the athletic zest,
social adventure, worthy ambition, and vocational quest of youth. Those
segments of the church which believe in bringing every legitimate human
interest within the scope and sanction of religion will in the nature of
things offer a more immediate and telling competition to the harmful
devices of the city.

But with the exception of a few boys' clubs and scout patrols, for whose
direction there is always a shameful shortage of willing and able lay
leadership, the church has not as yet grasped the problem; and this
remains true when one grants further the value of organized boys'
classes in the Sunday school and of the "socials" and parties of young
people's societies. To be sure, the Protestant church, expressing itself
through the Young Men's Christian Association, has laid hold of the more
respectable edge of the problem. But with few exceptions this work is
not as yet missionary, militant, or diffused to the communities of
greatest need. A few experiments are now being made, but probably the
Y.M.C.A., more than the individual church, is under the necessity of
treating the underlying economic evils with a very safe degree of
caution; and in both there is the ever-recurrent need of an unsparing
analysis of motive for the purpose of ascertaining which, after all, is
paramount--human welfare or institutional glory.

The tendency ever is to cultivate profitable and self-supporting fields
and sound business policies. But the case of thousands upon thousands of
boys living in localities that are socially impoverished, unfortunate,
and debasing constitutes a call to the missionary spirit and method. If
the impulse which is so ready and generous in the exportation of
religion and so wise in adaptation to the interests and abilities of the
foreign group could but lay hold of our most difficult communities with
like devotion and with scientific care there would be developed in due
time advanced and adequate methods, which in turn would take their
rightful place as a part of civic or educational administration.

As is illustrated in both education and philanthropy, the function of
the church in social development has been of this order, and the mistake
of short-sighted religious leaders has been to desert these children
when once they have found an abode within the civil structure. The
pastoral spirit of the new era claims again the entire parish, however
organized, and guards its children still. The pioneer is needed at home
just as he is needed abroad, and the pioneering agency must have the
same zeal and freedom in order to mark out the way of salvation for
hordes of wild city boys who are the menacing product of blind economic
haste.

[Illustration: WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH ME?]

The church should see this big problem and accept the challenge. Society
should awaken to the fact that in our large cities there is growing up a
generation of boys who morally "cannot discern between their right hand
and their left hand"--this through no fault of theirs, for they are but
a product. If they are unlovely, "smart," sophisticated, ungrateful, and
predatory, what has made them so? Who has inverted the prophetic promise
and given them ashes for beauty and the spirit of heaviness for the
garment of praise? As matters now stand it is not the ninety and nine
who are safe and the one in peril. That ratio tends to be reversed, and
will be unless right-minded people accept individually and in their
organized relations a just responsibility for the new life that is
committed for shaping and destiny to the evolving modern city.



CHAPTER V

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF ORGANIZED PLAY[6]


The value of work as a prime factor in character building must not be
overlooked. In the revival of play that is sweeping over our American
cities and in the tendency to eliminate effort from modern education
there is danger of erecting a superficial and mere pleasure-seeking
ideal of life. It is upon the background of the sacred value of work
that the equally legitimate moral factor of play is here considered.
Further, the value of _undirected_ play in cultivating initiative,
resourcefulness, and imagination, especially in young children, is worth
bearing in mind. One must grant also that play is not always enlisted in
the service of morality. But neither is religion. Both may be. At any
rate it is evident that when boy nature is subjected to city conditions
we must either provide proper outlet and guidance for the boy's play
instincts or be guilty of forcing him into the position of a law-breaker
and a nuisance.

Reduced to its lowest terms, organized play is thus recognized as a
convenient substitute for misconduct. Even the property owner and
peace-loving citizen, if moved by no higher motive, will agree to the
adage that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," and
will welcome the endeavor to safeguard property rights and promote the
peace of the community by drawing off the adventurous and
mischief-making energies of the boys into the less expensive channels of
play. Practical men are quite agreed that it is better for "gangs" to
release their energy and ingenuity against one another in a series of
athletic games than to seek similar adventure and satisfaction in
conflict with established property rights and the recognized agencies of
peace and order.

Nevertheless there persists in the church, however unconsciously, a sort
of piety that disregards the body, and the conventional Christian ideal
has certainly been anemic and negative in the matter of recreation. The
Young Men's Christian Associations with their reproduction of the Greek
ideal of physical well-being have served to temper the other-worldly
type of Christianity with the idea of a well-rounded and physically
competent life as being consonant with the will of God.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Francke of Halle, an
educational organizer and philanthropist of no mean proportion, said,
"Play must be forbidden in any and all of its forms. The children shall
be instructed in this matter in such a way as to show them, through the
presentation of religious principles, the wastefulness and folly of all
play. They shall be led to see that play will distract their hearts and
minds from God, the Eternal Good, and will work nothing but harm to
their spiritual lives."

Only gradually does "the-world-as-a-vale-of tears" and
"the-remnant-that-shall-be-saved" idea give place to a faith that claims
for God the entire world with its present life as well as individual
immortality in future felicity. Miracle and cataclysm and postmortem
glory--the ever-ready recourse of baffled hope and persecuted
Christianity--are giving place more and more to a Christian conquest
that is orderly and inclusive of the whole sweep of human life. The
church is but dimly conscious, as yet, that through the aid of science
she has attained this magnificent optimism; much less does she realize
its full implication for social service and the saving of the
individual, both body and soul.

The minister as the herald and exemplar of such an imperial salvation
cannot ignore the exceptional opportunities which the play interests of
boyhood offer. He whose task has been to reconcile men to God, to bring
them into harmony with the universe in its ultimate content, cannot
neglect those activities which more than anything else in the life of
the boy secure the happy co-ordination of his powers, the placing of
himself in right relation with others and in obedience to law. These are
the moral and religious accomplishments aimed at in the teaching of
reconciliation which bulks so large in Christian doctrine; and by
whatever means this right adjustment to self, to others, and to the will
of God is brought about, it always produces the sure harvest of service
and joy.

To some undoubtedly it will seem sacrilegious to suggest that play can
have anything to do in a transaction so deeply moral and so
fundamentally religious. Yet a psychological analysis of both play and
worship at their best will reveal marked similarities in spontaneity, in
self-expression for its own sake and free from ulterior ends, in
symbolism, semi-intoxication and rhythm, in extension and enrichment of
the self, and in preparation for the largest and most effective living.
That such a claim is not altogether extravagant may be demonstrated in
part by canvassing the moral reactions of a well-organized group engaged
in some specific game. For in merely discussing the play attitude, which
is applicable to every interest of life, there is the danger of so
sublimating the value of play that its importance, while readily
granted, will not affect pastoral or educational methods. This mistake
is only comparable with another which dwells upon the religious life of
the boy as dependent upon the use of some inherent religious faculty
that is quite detached from the normal physical and mental processes.
Such an attitude favors an easy escape from both the labor of character
building and the obligations of environmental salvation. Recognizing
these dangers and remembering that morality and religion are most valid
when acquired and incorporated in actual conduct, one may analyze a
standard game in search of its ethical worth.

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.

[Illustration: THE NORMAL BOY IN THE ABNORMAL PLAYGROUND]

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.

[Illustration: WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?]

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.

[Illustration: THE GUILD, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.]

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.

[Illustration: IMPORTED CIVIC TIMBER]

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.

[Illustration: A CASE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SALVATION]

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.

The best policy is for the pastor to figure out how boys' work can be
begun without coming before the church for an appropriation. It is well
to begin in a very humble way with such funds as the boys can raise and
the backing of a few interested people, securing from the trustees of
the church the use of some part of the premises subject to recall of the
privilege on sufficient grounds; and--a consideration never to be
slighted although often hard to get--the good-will and co-operation of
the sexton. With the sexton against him, no pastor can make a church
boys' club succeed. The club will make no mistake in paying the church
something for the heat and light consumed.

If an indoor area sufficient for basket-ball and a room suited to club
meetings can be had, the initial apparatus for winter work need not
exceed a parallel bar, a vaulting-horse, and three floor mats in
addition to the basket-ball equipment. This will involve an outlay of
from $75 to $150. Good parallel bars are as expensive as they are
serviceable; but boys have been known to make their own, and this is
highly desirable. Indian clubs, dumb-bells, and wands may only prove a
nuisance unless they can be carefully put away after the exercises.
Anyway, boys do not care greatly for calisthenics and most drills can be
given without these trappings. Granting that the boys have faithful and
wise supervision, the undertaking should be allowed to rest upon them to
the full measure of their ability.

When it has become clear that funds and quarters can be provided, the
matter of formal organization should be taken up. The ideal church club
is not a mass club where certain privileges are given to large numbers
of boys who take out memberships; but a group club, or clubs, under
democratic control. Prior to calling the boys together for organization,
the pastor will have blocked out the main articles of a constitution,
and will have formulated some ideas as to the ritual and procedure which
shall have place in the weekly meetings of the club. In order to do this
intelligently, he will need to study such organizations as the Knights
of King Arthur and various independent church clubs that have proven
successful in fields similar to his own. Often there is something in his
own field that will lend definite color and interest to his local
organization. The following sample constitution is offered for purpose
of suggestion only and as a concession to the sentiment attaching to my
first boys' club of a dozen years ago.


CONSTITUTION

I. We be known as the Waupun Wigwam.

II. For to be sound of body, true of heart, unselfish, and Christian we
be joined together.

III. They that have seen ten to fourteen summers may join our Wigwam one
by one if we want them.  High names have we. These names we use in our
Wigwam.

IV. At our meetings around the Campfire each Brave is Chief in turn and
chooseth one to guard the entrance. Medicine Man serveth us continually.
He knoweth his Braves. He chooseth Right Hand to serve him. When days
are longest and when days are shortest we choose one to write what we do
in Wigwam, one to collect small wampum and one to keep the same.

V. They that be older than we, they that be our friends may visit us in
our Wigwam. Woman by us is honored. Chivalry by us is shown. Whatever is
weak is by us protected.

VI. Measured are we when we join the Wigwam and once a year
thereafter--our height, calf of leg, hip, chest, and arm. This by
Medicine Man who keepeth the writings and adviseth how to improve. He
praiseth what good we do, and alloweth not "what harmeth body, defileth
tongue, or doeth ill to mind."

VII. Small wampum pay we all alike according to the need of the Wigwam
and the Campfire.

VIII. Deeds of valor do we read in Wigwam and Indian tales of old. Each
telleth of brave deeds he knows. A motto have we. This Medicine Man
giveth every three moons. We have our war whoop and our battle song. We
loyally help Medicine Man in his work and when he speaketh in the Great
Tent.

IX. When admitted to the Wigwam we very solemnly vow to be obedient to
all its laws and to try to please our Great High Chief in Heaven who
ruleth every tribe, World without end. Amen.



RITUAL

THE WIGWAM WAY


_The Braves being seated in a semicircle, the Chief, clad in blanket and
attended by Right Hand, enters. All arise. Chief takes position. Waits
until there is perfect silence._

_Chief_: My trusted and loyal Braves!

_All_: Hail to our Chief!

_C_: I am about to sit with you around our friendly Campfire. Brave ----
---- will guard the entrance that none come into the Wigwam at this
time. Let such as be of our Wigwam advance and prove themselves.

_Each Brave comes forward in turn, whispers the motto in the Chief's ear
and says_, May I, ---- ----, be known as a loyal Brave of the Waupun
Wigwam?

_C_: As such be thou known.

_All_: So may it be! _(When this is done the Chief continues.)_

_C_: For what are we bound together?

_All_: For to be sound of body, true of heart, unselfish, and Christian
we be bound together.

_C_: What virtues are the greatest?

_All_: Faith, hope, and love.

_C_: Who is great?

_All_: He that serves.

_C_: What is our sign?

_All_: The sign of the cross.

_C_: Sing we a song of valor.

_All sing_: "The Son of God goes forth to war."

_C_: Let us be seated. (_He gives one rap with the tomahawk._)

_C_: Brave ---- ----, admit any who are late and have given you the
motto.

_C_: Medicine Man will read from the Book and pray. _(All kneel for the
prayer_.)

_C_: Brave ---- ---- will read what we did last.

C: Brave ---- ---- will find who are here. _(Each one-present answers
"Ho" when his name is called)._

_C_: Brave ---- ---- will tell what wampum we have.

_C_: Is there any business to come before our Wigwam? _(Reports,
unfinished business, and new business_.)

_C_: Is there one fit to join our Wigwam? (_If there is a candidate who
has secured his parents' consent and who at a previous meeting has been
elected to membership with not more than two ballots against him he can
be initiated at this time_.)

_C_: Brave Right Hand, what shall we do now? _(Right Hand says how the
time shall be spent_.)

CLOSING

_Chief calls to order with a whistle. Each Brave takes his place quickly
and quietly. (Moccasins or gymnasium shoes are worn in all Wigwam
sessions_.)

_Chief gives two raps. All arise_.

_C_: My Braves, we are about to leave the Campfire. Let us join hands
and repeat our covenant. _(All join hands and repeat clause by clause
after the Chief_.)

    We covenant with our Chief and one another:

    To be true men,
    To protect the weak,

    To honor woman,
    To make the most of life,
    And to endeavor to please God.
    So do we covenant.

_Then the national anthem is sung and the following yell is given_:

    Who are we?
    Chee Poo Kaw
    Waupun Wigwam,
    Rah, Rah, Rah!!

This club proved of value in a town of three thousand which had a dozen
saloons and no organized work for boys or young men. It was supplemented
by a brotherhood for the older boys. In the clubroom was a large
fireplace in which a wood fire burned during the sessions. The room
could be partially darkened. The walls were covered with Indian pictures
and handicraft, and the surrounding country abounded in Indian relics.
In the summer the club went camping on the shore of a lake nine miles
distant. From another of the many successful clubs of this type the
following article on "Purpose" as stated in the constitution is worthy
of note:

    "We gather in our Wigwam that we may become strong as our bows,
    straight as our arrows, and pure as the lakes of the forest."

Clubs patterned after rangers, yeomen, lifesaving crews, and what not
have been successfully projected to meet and idealize local interest;
and the novelty and slightly concealed symbolism seem to take with boys
of this age. But the most important factor is never the organization as
such but _the leader_.

For the period of from fourteen to seventeen years probably no better
organization has been devised than the Knights of King Arthur. Its full
requirements may be too elaborate in some cases but freedom to simplify
is granted, and also to eliminate the requirement of Sunday-school
attendance as a prerequisite to membership and the requirement of church
membership as a prerequisite to knighthood. Leaders dealing with this
age should read _The Boy Problem_ by William Byron Forbush and _The
Boy's Round Table_ by Forbush and Masseck (Boston and Chicago: Pilgrim
Press, 6th edition, $1.00 each).

Ordinarily a policy of relationship between the club and Sunday school
and church will have to be formulated. It is always best to let the
Sunday school and the church stand on their own merits and not to use
the club as a bait for either. Nor should ranking in the club be
conditioned on church membership. Boys should not be tempted to make the
church a stepping-stone to their ambition in this more attractive
organization. The best policy is that of the "open door." Let the club
do all that it can for boys who are already in the Sunday school and
church, but let it be open to any boy who may be voted in, and then
through example and moral suasion let such boys be won to church and
Sunday school by the wholesome influence of the leader and the group,
quite apart from any conditions, favors, or ranking within the club
itself.

An unofficial relation between the Sunday school and the club will be
maintained by having club announcements given in the school and by
bringing the Sunday-school superintendent before the club frequently. In
some churches the boys' whole department of the Sunday school is the
boys' club, and this may prove a good method where it can be carried out
with proper divisions and specialization as to age, etc.

In discussing any proposed constitution, consideration should be given
to suggestions from the boys themselves and every question should be
threshed out in a reasonable, democratic way, strictly after the fashion
of deliberative bodies. The opinion of the leader is sure to have its
full weight, and matters needing further consideration can always be
referred to committees to be reported back. Questions of discipline
should be handled by the club itself, the director interfering only as a
last resort to temper the drastic reactions of a youthful and outraged
democracy. If there is a men's organization in the church tie the club
to that. This will guarantee strength and permanency to the club and
will help the men by giving them a chance to help the boys.

The form of the constitution and ritual will be governed by the age
which they seek to serve. Boys from ten to fourteen years may not rise
to the splendid formality of the Knights of King Arthur. Possibly the
idealization of the best Indian traits will serve them better. From
fourteen to seventeen or eighteen the knighthood ideals are most
satisfying, while one may question their utility after that when the
youth turns to reflection and debate and is suited by civic and
governmental forms of organization. It must not be assumed that any one
type of organization is good for all ages and does not need to be
supplemented, modified, or superseded as the boy makes his adolescent
ascent.

If the pastor has limited time and limited help he will do well to
center his attention on the important period of twelve to fifteen
years; and in order to do his work properly in the club meetings and on
the gymnasium floor especially, he should have an adult helper as soon
as the attendance exceeds ten in number. It is far more important to do
the training well than to make a great showing in numbers and at the
same time fail in creating a proper group standard and in developing
individual boys. In the ordinary improvised church gymnasium one man to
every ten boys is a good rule.

In a church club that grew to have a membership of sixty, the following
grouping for gymnasium privileges was found to work well: boys ten,
eleven, and twelve years old, from 4:15 to 5:30 in the afternoon; boys
thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, from 7:00 to 8:15 the same
evening; and boys sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old, from 8:15
to 9:30. Such a use of the plant secures economy of time, heating, etc.,
and with a little help one may give every boy two gymnasium sessions a
week, which is not too much. If possible, showers and lockers should be
provided; and in classification for gymnasium work allowance should be
made for retarded boys and for boys of extraordinary ability, so that
they may play with their equals irrespective of strict classification
by age. The best single test for classification is weight.

The leader will do well to see that everything is right and clean in
conversation and practice in the locker-room and showers. Also, foolish
prudery and shamefacedness must be wholesomely banished, and it will
benefit rather than harm the boys for their leader, after having taken
them through the exercises, to join them in the pleasure and stimulation
of the shower bath.

Not only the leader but as many interested church people as possible
should "back" the boys by attending their meets and games with other
teams. Remember that in order to command their full loyalty some loyalty
to them must be shown. The important function of the annual or
semi-annual banquet should not be overlooked. Such an affair is
inexpensive and unquestionably an event in the life of every member. The
mothers will always be glad to provide the food and superintend the
service; and in every town there will be found men of high standing who
will count it an honor to address the club on such an occasion, while
entertainers and musicians will also gladly contribute their talent.
Probably the average minister does not duly appreciate how much
high-grade assistance may be had for the mere asking and how much
benefit comes to those who give of their ability as well as to those who
are the fortunate recipients of such service.

The clubroom rapidly grows rich in associations as it becomes decorated
with the symbols of the club and the trophies won from time to time.
Things that have happened but a year ago become entrancing lore to a
group of boys, and the striking features of meetings, outings, or
contests lose nothing in sentiment and cohesive worth as the months
pass. The sophisticated adult may not fully appreciate these little
by-products of club activity, but the boy who is growing into his social
and larger self makes every real incident a jewel rich in association
and suggestive of the continuity and oneness of his group life. The use
of an appropriate pin or button, of club colors, yells, whistles, and
secret signals will bear fruit a hundred fold in club consciousness and
solidarity.

Summer is especially hard on the city boy. If there is no vacation
school, wholesome outdoor job, or satisfactory play, then mischief is
certain. Indoor life is particularly distasteful during the hot weather
and the flat is intolerable. Long hours and late are spent upon the
street or in places of public amusement where immoral suggestions
abound. High temperature always weakens moral resistance and there is no
telling into what trouble the boy may drift. Hence to relinquish boys'
work in the summer is to fail the boy at the very time of his greatest
need. The competent leader does not abandon, he simply modifies his
endeavor. As early in the spring as the boys prefer outdoor play he is
with them for baseball, track work, tennis, swimming, tramping, fishing,
hunting, camping; closing the season with football and remaining out
until the boys are eager to take up indoor work. The lack of formal
meetings in the summer need not concern the leader. It is sufficient
that he give the boys his fellowship and supervision and keep them well
occupied.

In all of this outdoor work the program and activities of the Boy Scouts
of America are unsurpassed. In cultivating the pioneer virtues and in
promoting health, efficiency, good citizenship, nature-study, and humane
ideals no movement for boys has ever held such promise, and the promise
will be realized if only Scout Masters in proper number and quality can
be secured. Here again the gauntlet is thrown at the door of the church
and the challenge is to her manhood from the manhood of tomorrow.

[Illustration: CITY BOYS "HIKING"]

[Illustration: A WEEK-END CAMP]

The ideal club will have its summer outing. When properly planned and
conducted, a summer camp is of all things to be desired. For several
months it should be enjoyed in anticipation, and if all goes well it
will be a joyous climax of club life, an experience never to be
forgotten. But like all good work with boys, it is difficult and
exacting. Safety and the rights of all cannot be conserved apart from
strict military or civic organization; and no leader will take boys to
camp and assume responsibility for life and limb without a thorough
understanding and acceptance on their part of the discipline and routine
which must be scrupulously enforced.

Every boy should be provided well in advance with a list of the utensils
and outfit needed, and the organization of the camp should give to each
one his proper share of work. The efficiency and dispatch of a corps of
boys so organized is only equaled by the joy that comes from the
vigorous and systematic program of activities from daylight to dark.

The best way for the leader to become proficient in conducting a camp is
to take an outing with an experienced manager of a boys' camp; the next
best way is by conference with such a person. The _Handbook_ of the Boy
Scouts of America will be found very helpful in this respect, and
_Camping for Boys_ by H.W. Gibson, Y.M.C.A. Press, is excellent. It is
necessary to emphasize the necessity of strict discipline and
regularity, a just distribution of all duties, full and vigorous use of
the time, extra precaution against accident, some formal religious
exercise at the beginning of the day, with the use of the rare
opportunity for intimate personal and group conference at the close of
the day when the charm of the campfire is upon the lads. When boys are
away from home and in this paradise of fellowship their hearts are
remarkably open and the leader may get an invaluable insight into their
inmost character.

Whenever possible the minister will bring his boys' club work into
co-operation with the boys' department of the Y.M.C.A. Where the
Y.M.C.A. exists and the church cannot have moderate gymnasium privileges
of its own, arrangements should be made for the regular use of the
association's gymnasium. It is desirable that the stated use of the
gymnasium be secured for the club as such, since the individual use in
the general boys' work of the association is not as favorable to
building up a strong consciousness in the church club. The Y.M.C.A. can
best organize and direct the inter-church athletics and it has performed
a great service for the church clubs in organizing Sunday-school
athletic leagues in the various cities, and in supplying proper
supervision for tournaments and meets in which teams from the different
churches have participated. To direct these contests properly has been
no small tax upon the officials, for the insatiable desire for victory
has in some cases not only introduced unseemly and ugly features into
the contests but has temporarily lowered the moral standard of certain
schools.

Superintendents and pastors have been known to sign entrance credentials
for boys who were not eligible under the rules. In some instances church
boys have descended to welcome the "ringer" for the purpose of "putting
it over" their competitors. In grappling with these difficulties and in
interpreting sound morality in the field of play the Y.M.C.A. has
already made a successful contribution to the moral life of the
Sunday-school boy. Nothing could be more startling to the religious
leader, who insists upon facing the facts, than the facility with which
the "good" Sunday-school boy turns away from the lofty precepts of his
teacher to the brutal ethics of the "win-at-any-price" mania. The
Sunday-School Athletic League under the guidance of the Y.M.C.A. tends
to overcome this vicious dualism.

In some districts the leader of the church boys' club may arrange to
make use of the social settlement, civic center, or public playground,
thus holding his group together for their play and supplementing the
church outfit. The object in every case is to maintain and strengthen a
group so possessed of the right ideals that it shall shape for good the
conduct and character of the members severally. To the many ministers
who despair of being able to conduct a club in person it should be said
that young men of sixteen or seventeen years of age make excellent
leaders for boys of twelve to fifteen years, and that they are more
available than older men.

These leaders, including the teachers of boys' classes, should come
together for conference and study at least once a month. The Y.M.C.A.
will be the most likely meeting-place, and its boys' secretary the
logical supervisor of inter-church activities. Wherever there is no such
clearing-house, the ministers' meeting or the inter-church federation
may bring the boys' leaders together for co-operation on a
community-wide scale. The multiplication of clubs is to be desired, both
for the extension of boys' work throughout all the churches, and for the
development of such inter-church activities among boys as will make for
mutual esteem and for the growing unity of the church of God.



Footnotes

Footnote 1: General reading: W.I. Thomas, _Source Book for Social
Origins,_ The University of Chicago Press; G. Stanley Hall,
_Adolescence_, D. Appleton & Co.; C.H. Judd, _Genetic Psychology for
Teachers_, D. Appleton & Co.

Footnote 2: Books recommended: _Official Handbook_, Boy Scouts of
America, 200 Fifth Ave., New York; K.L. Butterfield, _Chapters in Rural
Progress_, The University of Chicago Press; K.L. Butterfield, _The
Country Church and the Rural Problem_, The University of Chicago Press.

Footnote 3: Books recommended: Jane Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the
City Streets_, Macmillan; D.F. Wilcox, _Great American Cities_,
Macmillan.

Footnote 4: See monograph on _Five-and Ten-Cent Theatres_ by Louise de
Koven Bowen, The Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago.

Footnote 5: See monograph, _A Study of Public Dance Halls_, by Louise de
Koven Bowen, The Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago.

Footnote 6: Books and articles recommended: E.B. Mero, _The American
Playground,_ Dale Association, Boston; K. Groos, _The Play of Man,_ D.
Appleton & Co.; J.H. Bancroft, _Games for the Playground, Home, School,
and Gymnasium_, Macmillan; C.E. Seashore, "The Play Impulse and Attitude
in Religion," _The American Journal of Theology_, XIV, No. 4; Joseph
Lee, "Play as Medicine," _The Survey_, XXVII, No. 5.

Footnote 7: Books recommended: Frank Parsons, _Choosing a Vocation_,
Houghton Mifflin Co.; Meyer Bloomfield, _The Vocational Guidance of
Youth_, Houghton Mifflin Co.

Footnote 8: Books recommended: Georg Kerschensteiner, _Education for
Citizenship,_ Rand McNally & Co.; William R. George, _The Junior
Republic_, D. Appleton & Co.

Footnote 9: Books recommended: John L. Alexander, _Boy Training_,
Y.M.C.A. Press; G. Stanley Hall, _Youth, Its Education, Regimen and
Hygiene,_ D. Appleton & Co.

Footnote 10: For bibliography see William B. Forbush, _The Coming
Generation_, D. Appleton & Co., and the appendix of _Handbook for Boys,
The Boy Scouts of America_.





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