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