twenty-six boys' clubs that are
down in the Charity Organization Society's directory, nineteen are under
church roofs or patronage, and of the remaining seven I know two at least
to have been founded by churches. The proportion is more than preserved, I
think, in the larger number not registered there, as in all the
philanthropic work of many kinds that is now going on among the children.
The Roman Catholics never lost sight of the fact that the little ones were
the life of the Church, which the Protestants have had, in a measure, to
rediscover. Their grip upon the children was never relaxed. The parochial
school has enabled them to maintain it without need of recourse to the
social shifts the Protestants are adopting to regain lost prestige.
Nevertheless, they have not let lie unused the best grappling-hook by
which the boy might be caught and held. Their schools and churches abound
with clubs and societies, organized upon a plan of absolute home-rule,
under the spiritual directorship of the parish priest. Among Protestant
denominations the Episcopal Church especially shows this evidence of a
strong life stirring within it. The Boys' Clubs of Calvary Parish, of St.
George's, and of many other churches, are powerful moral agents in their
own neighborhoods. Everywhere some strong sympathetic personality is found
to be the centre and the life of the work. It may be that the pastor
himself is the moving force; or he has the faculty of stirring it in
others. His young men are at work in the parish. It is a hopeful sign to
find young men, to whom the sacrifice meant the loss of much that makes
life beautiful, giving their time and services freely to the poor night
schools and rough boys' clubs--hopeful alike for the Church, for the boys,
and for their teachers. The women have had the missionary work of the
Church, as well as the pews, long enough to themselves. I am not speaking
now of the college-bred men and women, who in their University Settlements
pursue the plan that has proven so beneficent in England, but of another
class, young business men, bank clerks, and professional men--sometimes of
large means and of high social standing--whom night after night I have
found thus unostentatiously working among the children with more patience
than I could muster, and with the genuine love for their work that
overcame all obstacles. They were not always going the errand of a church
there, but that they were doing the work of the C