interest of young life and may often co-operate in the
organization and management of such movements. Every church should
strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and
power to such work and should receive through the same channels
first-hand information of this form of constructive and preventive
philanthropy. He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies
organized in connection with his own church. He can plead for a real and
longer childhood in behalf of Christ's little ones who are often
sacrificed through commercial greed, un-Christian business ambition,
educational blindness, and ignorance. He can preach a gospel that does
not set the body over against the soul, science over against the Bible,
and the church over against normal life; but embraces every child of man
in an imperial redemption which is environmental and social as well as
individual, physical as well as spiritual. In short, he can study and
serve his community, not as one who must keep an organization alive at
whatever cost, but as one who must inspire and lead others to obey the
Master whose only reply to our repeated protestations of love is, "Feed
my lambs."

CHAPTER VI

THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]

It is practically impossible to overemphasize the importance of the
boy's vocational choice. Next to his attitude toward his Maker and his
subsequent choice of a life partner this decision controls his worth and
destiny. For it is not to be supposed that play with all its virtue, its
nourish and exercise of nascent powers, and its happy emancipation into
broader and richer living can adequately motivate and permanently
ennoble the energies of youth. Until some vocational interest dawns,
education is received rather than sought and will-power is latent or but
intermittently exercised. Play has a great orbit, but every true parent
and educator seeks to know the axis of a given life.

For some boys presumably of high-school age and over, this problem
becomes real and engrossing, but for the vast majority there is little
intelligent choice, no wise counsel, no conscious fronting of the
profoundly religious question of how to invest one's life. The children
of ease graduate but slowly, if at all, from the "good-time" ideal,
while the children of want are ordinarily without option in the choice
of work. But for all who, being permitted and helped, both seek and find
then-proper places in the ranks of