ous impulses but imbued with a steady
abiding faith in the worth of social action. They have had the good
impulses, but these impulses have been steadied and rendered
permanently valuable because faith based on knowledge of objectives
was available.

If the serious errors of the past are to be avoided it will be
necessary for those intrusted with responsibilities of church
leadership to vastly increase their knowledge of problems of group
life and of methods of control of group life. The following pages are
designed to aid the prospective religious leader, either professional
or lay, as far as possible in understanding some of the problems that
must be dealt with in making human life what Christianity hopes for.
Results already have been achieved sufficient to place beyond question
the principle that the church must approach life from every possible
angle. The effort to produce right attitudes in the individual must be
continued, but the methods used must be varied and multiplied.

Furthermore, before the sound point of view with reference to the
method of approach to the problems of the church can be obtained it
will be necessary to have a clear understanding as to the place of the
child in the moral order. Those who derive their theology by reading
and interpreting isolated passages of the Scriptures sometimes arrive
at unexpected, and, from the point of view of rational living,
eccentric and positively harmful conclusions. Some devoted readers
find in the writings of Paul something about "Whereas in Adam all die,
in Christ all are made alive"; and in Christ's words the utterance to
Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again he shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven." They have drawn from these doctrines that all men are born
with sin inherent in their natures and that there is no good in the
soul until "conversion" has taken place. So long as these doctrines
find a place in the preaching and practice of churches the method of
world salvation will be radically different from that for which the
writer is contending.

In brief, if the words of Christ are taken at their face value when he
said "Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the
kingdom of heaven," we have an entirely different basis of approach to
our problem than if we assume that all are lost except those upon whom
the mystical influence of "conversion" in the traditional sense has
operated. If the assumption that children are born good is accept