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