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