ul wherefrom he stole, but his we
cannot find:
We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have
seared him to the bone,
And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul
of his own."

Fortunately, however, ministerial professionalism is on the wane.
Protestantism, in its more democratic forms, rates the man more and the
office less, and present-day tests of practical efficiency are adverse
to empty titles and pious assumption. To be "Reverend" means such
character and deeds as compel _reverence_ and not the mere "laying on
of hands." Work with boys discovers this basis, for there is no place
for the holy tone in such work, nor for the strained and vapid quotation
of Scripture, no place for excessively feminine virtues, nor for the
professional hand-shake and the habitual inquiry after the family's
health. In a very real sense many a minister can be saved by the boys;
he can be saved from that invidious classification of adult society into
"men, women, and ministers," which is credited to the sharp insight of
George Eliot.

The minister is also in need of a touch of humor in his work. The
sadness of human failure and loss, the insuperable difficulties of his
task, the combined woes of his parish, the decorum and seriousness of
pulpit work--all operate to dry up the healthy spring of humor that
bubbled up and overran in his boyhood days. What health there is in a
laugh, what good-natured endurance in the man whose humor enables him to
"side-step" disastrous and unnecessary encounters and to love people
none the less, even when they provoke inward merriment. The boys' pastor
will certainly take life seriously, but he cannot take it somberly.
Somewhere in his kind, honest eye there is a glimmer, a blessed survival
of his own boyhood.

So, being ministered to by the comradeship of boys, he retains his
sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the
verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important
committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological
inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor. Life
cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams
of living water and into the whispering woods he catches again the wild
charm of that all-possible past: the smell of the campfire, the joyous
freedom and good health of God's great out-of-doors. Genius and success
in life depend lar