a leader be
steeped in the Idylls of the King, the Knights of King Arthur will be
popular with the boys and the church. If the superintendent of the
brotherhood or society be human and magnetic, the church and the boy
will sing its praises. If the scoutmaster is an out-of-door man and has
a point of contact with the boy, the Boy Scouts will be the solution of
all our difficulties. Here lies the crux of the whole matter. If boys
are added to the church through any organization, it is not because of
the method, but because of the worker of the method. The method counts
because it is part of the worker--is in his blood.

=Method=

The aim of all church work should be the production not merely of
manhood but _Christian manhood_. The vision is to see the boy a
Christ-like boy--a physically, socially, mentally and spiritually
balanced man in the making. The organizations used, then, in boys' work
should be selected with this aim in mind.

Again, modern psychology has demonstrated to us that all boy activities
must be graded according to each stage of a boy's development, and that
there are several such stages. In the adolescent boy these may roughly
be classed as the heroic and reflective stages, or as early, middle, and
late adolescence. Boy activities, then, must group themselves to
minister to the needs of each separate stage in order to work
effectively. But psychology has also shown us that the activities of any
one stage must also be graded to meet the needs of that one stage. Thus
the heroic may run from the twelfth to the fifteenth year, and the
activities of this phase should be graded to meet the development of the
phase. This is well illustrated by the Tenderfoot Second Class Scout and
First Class Scout degrees of the Boy Scouts which operate in this
period.

The factors of the problem, then, to be considered in the method are:
First, Christian Manhood; second, the fact that there are distinct and
separate stages of growth in a boy's development, each stage having its
own well-defined steps of growth; and third, the selection of existing
boy organization activities to meet the need and produce the aim or
desired result.

By way of illustration, let us consider a group of boys just past their
twelfth year. All their physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs
are to be met. The boys are just adolescent and their outlook because of
that is altruistic. They have reached the "ganging" period, and so must
ha