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