village works great harm to boys. It is
not only that they are deprived of that guidance which true Christianity
would give them, but they are confronted from the first with a spectacle
of pettiness, jealousy, and incompetency which they will probably
forever associate with Christianity, at least in its ecclesiastical
forms. Villages are at best sufficiently susceptible to those
unfortunate human traits that make for clique and cleavage in society,
and when the Christian church, instead of unifying and exalting the
community life, adds several other divisive interests with all the
authority of religion, the hope of intelligent, united, and effective
service for the community, on a scale that would arouse the imagination
and enlist the good-will of all right-minded people, is made sadly
remote.

So far as church work is concerned, the village boy is likely to be
overlooked, as promising little toward the immediate financial support
of the church and the increase of membership. In the brief interval of
two years--the average duration of the village pastorate--it does not
seem practicable for the minister to go about a work which will require
a much longer time to produce those "satisfactory results" for which
churches and missionary boards clamor. A revival effort which inflates
the membership-roll, strenuous and ingenious endeavors to increase the
offerings, are the barren makeshifts of a policy which does not see the
distinct advantage and security in building Christian manhood from the
foundation up.

It must not be thought that the minister is largely to blame for the
situation as it now is. Perpetuating institutions beyond the time of
their usefulness is one of society's worst habits, and it is not to be
expected that religious organizations, which in a given stage of the
development of Christian truths were vital and necessary, can easily be
persuaded to surrender their identity, even after the cause that called
them into being has been won.

Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great has passed away.

But the real religious leader who loves boys will not be balked by the
pettiness and inability of denominationalism. His hope lies not solely
in the church or the churches, but largely in the intelligence,
sympathy, and generosity of the unchurched citizens, whose number and
importance in the small town is probably in the inverse ratio of the
number of churches. Busines