r, he is occupied particularly with those
affairs of the inner life which are as intangible as they are important.
His relation with people is largely a Sunday relation, or at any rate a
religious one, and he meets them on the pacific side. Very naturally
they reveal to him their best selves, and, true to Christian charity and
training, he sees the best in everyone. If the women of his parish
receive more than their proper share of attention the situation is
proportionately worse. It follows that the minister needs the most
wholesome contact with stern reality in order to offset the subtle drift
toward a remote, theoretical, or sentimental world. In this respect
commercial life is more favorable to naturalness and virility; while a
fair amount of manual labor is conducive to sanity, mental poise, and
sound judgment as to the facts of life. The minister must have an
elemental knowledge of and respect for objective reality; and he must
know human nature.

Now among all the broad and rich human contacts that can put the
minister in touch with vital realities there is none so electric, so
near to revelation as the boy. Collectively he is frank to the point of
cruelty and as elemental as a savage. Confronted alone and by the
minister, who is not as yet his chum, he reveals chiefly the minister's
helplessness. Taken in company with his companions and in his play he is
a veritable searchlight laying bare those manly and ante-professional
qualities which must underlie an efficient ministry. Later life, indeed,
wears the mask, praises dry sermons, smiles when bored, and takes
careful precautions against spontaneity and the indiscretions of
unvarnished truth; but the boy among his fellows and on his own ground
represents the normal and unfettered reaction of the human heart to a
given personality. The minister may be profoundly benefited by knowing
and heeding the frank estimate of a "bunch" of boys. They are the
advance agents of the final judgment; they will find the essential man.
May it not be with him as with Kipling's Tomlinson, who, under the
examination of both "Peter" and the "little devils," was unable to
qualify for admission either to heaven or hell:

And back they came with the tattered Thing, as
children after play,
And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has
bartered clean away.
We have threshed a stook of print and book, and
winnowed a chattering wind
And many a so