be ignored here. The ideal club will be bringing
the boy toward the altar of the church and at the right point along the
way the minister who is properly intimate with each boy will be assured
in private conference of the good faith and earnest purpose of his
prospective church member.

Before receiving boys into active church membership it is well that they
be given a course of instruction in a preparatory class. Only so can
the fundamentals of religion and the duties of church membership be
intelligently grasped. The value to the boy is also enhanced when the
ceremony of induction is made _formal and impressive_ to a degree that
shall not be surpassed in his entrance into any other organization. By
all means the boy should not be neglected after he has been received
into the church. Mistakes of this sort are common wherever undue
importance attaches to the conversion experience, and the numerical
ideal of church success prevails. If the task becomes too great for the
pastor let him find a responsible "big brother" for every boy received
into the church.

As the critical or skeptical traits of youth develop in later
adolescence the intellectual formulas and supports of religion will be
overhauled. What the boy has brought over out of the early imitative and
memorizing period of life will probably come up for review in later
adolescence. If his inherited theology corresponds to experience and
verifies itself in the light of the scientific methods of school and
college no great difficulty will be experienced. But if it does not
square with the youth's set of verifiable facts then there is added to
his necessary moral struggle for self-possession and spiritual control
the unnecessary and dangerous quest for a new faith, so that he is
forced to swap horses in midstream and when the spring freshet is on.

Possibly this reorganization involved in the adolescent flux and
reflection cannot be altogether avoided, but with proper care much could
be done to lessen its dangers and to preserve a substantial continuity
of religious experience from childhood through youth and to the end of
life. It is a help not to have to be introduced to an altogether new God
in these succeeding stages. To preserve his identity enriches and
safeguards the life.

The imagination and wonder instinct of the child, his use of "natural
religion," his confirmation in habits of prayer, reverence, and worship,
his acquisition of choice religious litera