rning them from improper courses and associations, and in
keeping them from such. Moreover, our influence ought not to be merely
restrictive and admonitory. We should be sufficiently in sympathy with
them, familiar enough with the demands of their age and with the best
means of satisfying them, to be able to offer positive suggestions
respecting their employments, recreations, society, reading, and the like.
If we sustain proper relations to the youth of our charges, they will be
as likely to refer such questions to us, as matters of theology or
practical morality.

Now, the question of the amusements of our youth is as good a test
question in this matter as we need ask. _What, then, is the influence of
the clergy at large in regulating the diversions of the youth?_

I appeal to the experience of the mass of ministers, not with the few
_special friends_ and admirers, which most of them have among the young
people of their congregations, but with the _mass of the youth_. I appeal
to those judicious, farseeing Christians, who are wont to observe
carefully the tendencies of society, _if this influence is not a
comparative nullity_. In a question which, perhaps, as much as any other,
concerns the welfare of our youth, which has the most vital relations to
the attractions of home, which will enter, whether we may think it right
or not, into the considerations which influence the choice or rejection of
a religious life; at a point which the ministers of vice are fortifying
most strongly, wresting the best diversions to themselves, striving to
make them peculiarly their own, and to invest them permanently with
associations which shall exclude them from Christian homes; here, I say,
the Christian church, the appointed regulator and instructor in the ethics
of amusement, is, to a great extent, _at open issue with her own
intelligent youth, and practically powerless to execute her own decrees_.

It is well for us as ministers, to look this fact squarely in the face,
and to call things by their right names. How many pastors are in the
confidence of their youth with respect to the amusements of the latter? Is
not the fact rather that there is a tacit antagonism recognized between
the youth and the clergy on this subject, an antagonism growing, too,
every year less tacit and more avowed? Can it be denied that a very large
proportion of our youth regard their ministers as the foes to recreation,
and would sooner think of consulting