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