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tian people is no mere slumming expedition. We must not assume a patronizing air, or our efforts will be worse than useless. The benefits are not to be one-sided. The real fulfilment of this task will make America richer in spiritual wealth and in the friendship of those who have come to us from foreign shores."

Vocational Contacts.-To be thrown out into the world to earn one's living, ill-fitted by temperament and training and meet only with bitter struggle, competition, injustice, and personal indifference is to make anti-social rather than social contact. But to meet life prepared and with a spiritual conception of one's work, no matter how humble, is to put one's self in the way of social progress. Such a man will leaven and transform his environment and he himself will be transformed in the doing. Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Bolshevik movement in Russia, and Professor Edward M. Steiner both came to America as young immigrants. Their vocational contacts determined their careers. Had the Christian Church assisted Trotsky as it did Steiner to make the right kind of social adjustment, the history of Russia might have been different. This single instance is sufficient to stir up a thoughtful revolution in educational methods in regard to vocational guidance and training. The fundamental motive with which a young merchant, or professional man takes up his life work will result either in the making or unmaking of himself and the community.

Agriculture is undergoing a profound change because of the war. This means a new type of social life in rural communities. Mr. Edmund S. Brunner has written most illuminatingly upon this subject in a recent book entitled, "The Country Church in the New World Order." We quote several sentences which reveal the importance of this subject for religious education. "Our system of land tenure in America is atrocious. Leases are for the most part of one year's duration. The tenant tries to get all he can from the soil and put back as little as possible. If he fails on one farm, he knows he can move elsewhere, so he feels less interest than the owner in the community institutions such as the Church, school, and grange. If the soldier is sent out to the new reclaimed lands in any numbers, a problem new to this generation of rural thinkers will arise. Such action will call for the construction of a new social organization. There will have to be communities containing new homes, new schools, new churches ministering to men who have the background of France and all that that means. It will be half a decade at least before agriculture is normal and the food resources of the world restored. If the Boys' Working Reserve is made permanent, it is hard to estimate the physical, economic, and social good that can be accomplished. But this movement means more than an adjustment of the city boy to rural life. It means also that those to whom these boys have come will have to get accustomed to them. In this twofold adjust

ment, so freighted with possibilities for good, where successfully accomplished, the country church can play an important part.

Civic Contacts.-The conception which dawning manhood gets of local city government and politics is bound to color his attitude toward national and international relationships. One good man in a community can transform the civic ideals and mightily assist all young people in making the right adjustments in politics. Patriotism is the key to all political adjustments. Patriotism is love for one's home, one's community, and for God before it can become truly love for country. The man who has grown up with the Christian love of the world in his soul will not love his native land any the less but rather more. The homes, the public schools, and the Sunday schools of America can in a single decade completely revolutionize the civic life and ideals of any community.

World Contacts.-Modern invention, commerce, travel, history, and the morning papers have made the world a neighborhood; the League of Nations and the foreign mission propaganda of the Church will in a generation make it a great family. The children of America have heard the frightened, famished cry of the children of other lands and social contacts have been established which will endure. The two millions of American soldiers who went to France and Italy and fought side by side with at least twenty-seven other nationalities for a common ideal can never again live the same narrow isolated

life. The youth from the mountain home in Kentucky has suddenly found himself a member of a world family all with common hungers, aspirations, and ideals. Because of this neither he nor the community in which he lives can ever be the same. Religious education must learn the secret of helping each new generation to sense their world relationship.

To take a group of growing boys or young men and by patient teaching help them to make operative in their lives these fourteen laws is a work worthy of the finest powers. But once again we must come back to our fundamental position that it is only as we bring these lads into a personal relation to the real Christ and enlist their active efforts in a worthwhile Christian program that we will ever be able to accomplish our task. In Christ and His service is the fulfilment of all law. In the next two chapters we desire to discuss the program of service which the Church should present to the youth of the world.

T

XII

THE FINEST FIGHT OF ALL

HE upward pull of the moral ideal is the basis of human progress. There comes a

time, at least once in the life of every young man and woman, when they yearn to give themselves in self-sacrificing devotion for their ideals. The nation or the religion that cannot provide this chance and that does not encourage its exercise is doomed. It is not only a biological and national but a religious necessity. The philosophers of Germany say that war alone affords the manhood of a nation this opportunity; therefore, war is a biological necessity, hence moral. But we must not be misled by this subtle sophistry of logic. These impulses of the soul are elements of the ideal created for noble ends. War puts violent hands upon them and prostitutes them to unholy purposes. Christianity must offer in place of war, a positive program of action big enough and vital enough to compel the allegiance of youth and to offer them opportunity for achievement, self-denial and sacrifice. Five million of the best young men of America offered their lives for their country and for world ideals. Many of them never got to France and their disappointment was keen, almost tragic. Millions more were willing but were not accepted. This quickened impulse to give oneself for a holy

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