Allan Hoben

“ If we could but appreciate the great crude past whose conflicts still persist in the boy's gruesome and tragic dreams, filling him with a fear of the dark, which fear in time past was the wholesome and necessary monitor of self-preservation; if we could only realize how strenuous must be those experiences which guarantee a strong body, a firm will, and an appetite for objective facts, we would not make our education so insipidly nice, so intellectual, so bookish, and so much under the roof. ”

“ To be sure, there are certain satisfactions that a minister may lose all too quickly in these days. The spell of his eloquence may soon pass; the undivided love of all the people is no permanent tenure of him who speaks the truth even in love; speedy dissatisfaction and unbridled criticism are, alas, too often the practice of church democracy; but that man who has won the love of boys has thrown about himself a bodyguard whose loyalty will outmatch every foe. ”

“ Things that have happened but a year ago become entrancing lore to a group of boys, and the striking features of meetings, outings, or contests lose nothing in sentiment and cohesive worth as the months pass. The sophisticated adult may not fully appreciate these little by-products of club activity, but the boy who is growing into his social and larger self makes every real incident a jewel rich in association and suggestive of the continuity and oneness of his group life. ”

“ It is the delirium in which strong men seek the standard American testimonial of genius and ability, namely the accumulation of great wealth; and in this delirium they see labor as a commodity and childhood as a commercial factor. They do not think of people like themselves and of children like their own.
But the minister is the very champion of those higher rights, the defender of idealism, and as such the best friend of an industrial order which is perversely making this expensive blunder and reaping the blight of sullen citizenship and cynical and heartless toil. ”

“ In every community there are some homes in which the pastor finds it almost impossible to create a welcome for himself. Misconceptions of long standing, anti-church sentiments, old grievances block the way. But if in such a home there is a boy whose loyalty the pastor has won through association in the boys' club, at play, in camp--anywhere and anyhow--his eager hand will open both home and parental hearts to the wholesome friendship and kindly counsel of the minister of Christ. When the boy's welfare is at stake how many prejudices fade away! ”

“ The fire-worshiper of ancient times, the fierce tribesman, the savage hunter and fisher, the religion-making nomad, the daring pirate, the bedecked barbarian, the elemental fighter with nature and fellow and rival of every kind, the master of the world in making--comes before you in dramatic and often pathetic array in the unfolding life of the ordinary boy.
Our topmost civilization, although sustained and repleted by this original stuff, takes all too little account of these elemental traits. In the growing boy the ascending races are piled one on top of another. ”

“ Life is swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams. One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The ego which must gauge itself by external bearings is temporarily adrift and lost. Suicidal thoughts are easily evoked; and at such times the luxury of being odd and hopelessly misunderstood constitutes a chameleon-like morbidity that, with a slight change of light and color, becomes an obsession of conceit. The odd one, the mystery to self and others, is he not the great one that shall occupy the center of the stage in some stupendous drama? ”

“ While the game is intense and fatiguing, anything like a muscular rampage brings certain penalty to the player and loss to his team. So that, while the boy who does not play "snappy" and hard cannot rank high, neither can the boy who plays "rough-house." Forcefulness under control is the desideratum.
Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency. ”

“ WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?
The feeling of harmony and bien-être resulting from play is, in itself, a rare form of wealth for the individual and a blessing to all with whom one has to do. Every social contact tends to become wholesome. And who will say that the virtue of cheerfulness is not one of the most delightful and welcome forms of philanthropy? Play, rightly directed, always has this result.
Possibly no social work in America is more sanely constructive than that of the playground movement. In the few years of its existence it has made ample proof of its worth in humane and beneficent results ”

“ So is it ever with the adolescent soul unless society curses the desire for significance and makes it criminal.
These bare cliffs of primal personality have not yet undergone the abrasion of the glacial drift nor of the frost and the heat, the wind and the rain of long years. They are angular, bold, defiant, and unsuited to the pastoral and agricultural scenes of middle life. The grind of life with its slow accomplishment and failure has not as yet imparted caution and discretion. ”

“ The minister who gives the boy his due of love, service, and friendship will unwittingly secure more and better publicity than his more scholastic and less human brother. In the home and at school, here, there, and everywhere, these unrivaled enthusiasts sound the praises of the institution and the man. Others of their own kind are interested, and reluctant adults are finally drawn into the current. The man or church that is doing a real work for boys is as a city set on a hill. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Boys now at the age of twelve or fifteen will, in a score of years, manage the affairs of the world. All that has been accomplished--the inventions, the wealth, the experience in education and government, the vast industrial and commercial systems, the administration of justice, the concerns of religion--all will pass into their control; and they who, with the help of the girls of today, must administer the world's affairs, are, or may be, in our hands now when their ideals are nascent and their whole natures in flux. ”

“ The basement is perhaps the most vulnerable point in the armor of exclusive sanctity that encases the church. Here, if anywhere, organized church work for boys may be tolerated. Whenever it is, lights begin to shine from the basement windows several evenings a week, a noisy enthusiasm echoes through the ghostly spaces above, in a literal and figurative sense cobwebs are brushed away. ”

“ Taken in company with his companions and in his play he is a veritable searchlight laying bare those manly and ante-professional qualities which must underlie an efficient ministry. Later life, indeed, wears the mask, praises dry sermons, smiles when bored, and takes careful precautions against spontaneity and the indiscretions of unvarnished truth; but the boy among his fellows and on his own ground represents the normal and unfettered reaction of the human heart to a given personality. The minister may be profoundly benefited by knowing and heeding the frank estimate of a "bunch" of boys. ”

“ Miracle and cataclysm and postmortem glory--the ever-ready recourse of baffled hope and persecuted Christianity--are giving place more and more to a Christian conquest that is orderly and inclusive of the whole sweep of human life. The church is but dimly conscious, as yet, that through the aid of science she has attained this magnificent optimism; much less does she realize its full implication for social service and the saving of the individual, both body and soul. ”

“ 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." ”

“ In the midst of all the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips Brooks exclaim, "It's great fun to be a minister." An epoch-making president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor, with all the zest of a boy at play, "We've beaten them to a frazzle"; and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and imprisonment, calls out to his followers, "I have fought a good fight." "It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it." ”

“ He dreams of making his life an actual contribution to the welfare and glory of humanity. When it is put before him rightly he will scorn a selfish misappropriation of his life, and will enter the crusade for the city that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. Happy is the minister who has boys that bring their chums to see him for the purpose of enlistment. Happy is the minister whose hand often clasps the outstretched hand of the boy pledging himself to the greatest of all projects--the Kingdom of God in the earth ”

“ Looking to the improvement of this condition, while vocational training promises something by way of an economic basis for good citizenship, too much must not be expected of it alone. For if vocational efficiency be created and released in an environment devoid of civic idealism it will never pass beyond the grub stage. It will merely fatten a low order of life, and this at the expense of much that would otherwise lend verdure and freshness, shade, flower, and fruit to the garden of our common life. The able man or the rich man is not necessarily a good citizen. ”

“ In the great American experiment of democracy, where the welfare of the people is so often bartered for gold, and where public office is frequently prostituted to private gain, there is a proportionately great need of teaching in every possible way this fundamental virtue of loyalty. Our future will be secure only in the degree in which intelligent and strong men are devoted to the welfare of city and state after the fashion of the boy to his team. ”

“ The religious value of the principle here involved receives no little attention in sermon and Sunday-school class, but how tame and formal is its verbal presentation as compared with its registration in the very will and muscles of a boy at play! Wherever a state has become great or a cause victorious, wherever a hero--a Socrates or a Christ--has appeared among men, there has been the willingness, when necessary, to make the "sacrifice hit." The loyalty that has held itself ready so to serve on moral demand has to its credit all the higher attainments of humanity. ”

“ To be a hero and an ideal in the estimate of anyone is indeed a great call to the best that is in us; and when the minister, in the dark day or the bright, hears the acclaim of his bodyguard let him believe that it is the call of God to manhood that has the triple strength of faith, hope, and love. ”

“ Hence the religious life of the boy depends largely upon family and community conditions which in turn rest upon economic considerations. Whatever demoralizes the home, degrades the community, and crushes out idealism also damns the souls of little children. It requires no deep investigation of modern society to prove that this is being done, and the guilt of economic injustice and rapacity is measured ultimately in the cost to the human spirit which in every child pleads for life and opportunity, and, alas, too often pleads in vain. ”

“ 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 labor, life becomes constructively social and therefore self-respecting. ”

“ The pre-adolescent boy glorying in full Indian regalia, the early-adolescent proud in the suit of his team or in his accouterments as a Scout, and a little later, with quieter taste, the persistent fraternity pin--all of these tell the same story of the love of insignia and the power of the emblem in the social control and development of youth. Think also of the collecting mania, which among primitives was less strong than is ordinarily supposed, but which in early boyhood reaches forth its hands, industriously, if not always wisely, after concrete, tactual knowledge and proprietorship. ”

“ For the family to which the boy belongs is the human family. His parents alone and their characteristics do not explain him, nor does contemporary environment, important as that is. His ancestry is the human race, his history is their history, his impulses and his bodily equipment from which they spring are the result of eons of strife, survival, and habit. Four generations back he has not two but sixteen parents. Thus he comes to us out of the great physical democracy of mankind and doubtless with a tendency to re-live its ancient and deep-seated experiences. ”

“ If the minister could but realize the vast significance of such work, if he could feel the lure of those untold values lying like continents on the edge of the future awaiting discovery and development, if he could but know that he is swinging incipient forces of commanding personality into their orbits, directing destiny for the individual, predetermining for righteousness great decisions of the future, laying hold of the very kingdoms of this world for Christ, he surely would never again bemean himself in his own thought nor discount his peerless calling. ”

“ In patient and hopeful sympathy, in friendship that is personal and not professional, knowing that the door of the heart is opened only from within, the true minister, like his Master, waits. He knows, too, that a few words suffice in the great decisions of life, and that the handclasp of manly love speaks volumes. The prime qualification is a friendship that invites and respects confidence and a life that is above criticism. ”

“ The importance of the minister's part in this struggle for the body and soul of youth is based upon the fact that in this critical encounter there is no aid that is comparable with religion. Thousands of honest, serious-minded men frankly confess that in modern conditions they see little hope of this battle being won without religion as a sanction of right conduct. The boy needs God, a God to whom he can pray in the hour of temptation. He needs to regard his life with all its powers as God's investment, which he must not squander or pervert. ”