n away to sea and for the next seven years
led the rough life of a dock laborer, until he became much interested
in a little crippled boy, who by the death of his father had been left
solitary on a freight boat. My English friend promptly adopted the
child as his own and all the questionings of life centered about his
young protege. He was constantly driven to attend evening meetings
where he heard discussed those social conditions which bear so hard
upon the weak and sick. The crippled boy lived until he was fifteen
and by that time the regeneration of his foster father was complete,
the young docker was committed for life to the bettering of social
conditions. It is doubtful whether any abstract moral appeal could
have reached such a roving nature. Certainly no attempt to incite his
ambition would have succeeded. Only a pull upon his deepest sympathies
and affections, his desire to protect and cherish a weaker thing,
could possibly have stimulated him and connected him with the forces
making for moral and social progress.

This, of course, has ever been the task of religion, to make the sense
of obligation personal, to touch morality with enthusiasm, to bathe
the world in affection--and on all sides we are challenging the
teachers of religion to perform this task for the youth of the city.

For thousands of years definite religious instruction has been given
by authorized agents to the youth of all nations, emphasized through
tribal ceremonials, the assumption of the Roman toga, the Barmitzvah
of the Jews, the First Communion of thousands of children in Catholic
Europe, the Sunday Schools of even the least formal of the evangelical
sects. It is as if men had always felt that this expanding period of
human life must be seized upon for spiritual ends, that the tender
tissue and newly awakened emotions must be made the repository for the
historic ideals and dogmas which are, after all, the most precious
possessions of the race. How has it come about that so many of the
city youth are not given their share in our common inheritance of
life's best goods? Why are their tender feet so often ensnared even
when they are going about youth's legitimate business? One would
suppose that in such an age as ours moral teachers would be put upon
their mettle, that moral authority would be forced to speak with no
uncertain sound if only to be heard above the din of machinery and the
roar of industrialism; that it would have exerted it