take the flag and march up and down the street, and take the flag to school and show it to the teacher,' and a great big flag it was and a silk one, too. I walk up and down the street with the flag, and Thomas he came and say, 'Give me the flag. And I say, 'I won't,' and he say, 'Give me the flag, you old dago, give me the flag.' I say, 'I will not, it is my flag and I will not give it you.' He say, 'It is not your flag, you are no Americano, you are a dago,' '' and looking up into my face and clutching tight his flag with its broken stick, he said, "Miss Slattery, I am Americano, is it not so?" I said, "Yes, Antonio, it is so." I said to Thomas, "What are you?" "I am an American." "Yes, you are, but listen to this, Thomas and Antonio; we are all Americans in this country; we have the same last name, American, but we have different first names, Irish-American, Italian-American, French-American, German-American and SwedishAmerican, all different first names but one great big last name, American;" and he went away with his flag and as he went away he said, "Ha! ha! Antonio Dago Americano!' That is what the public school does today. I am jealous of the church that it should do the same thing, and that its white flag of conquest with its blue cross should be uplifted by them, and we should say to them, "You all have different first names but your last names are alike; you are Methodist Christians and Congregational Christians and Baptist Christians and every other sort of Christians, take your flag with its purity and be Christian, and when you do it the world will hear what you have to say." (Applause.) You may applaud but you will go home and be Baptists and Congregationalists and Methodists! Maybe you have to, I don't know, or for a while yet you have to, but I say to you that there is a time coming when that One who walked the streets of Galilee, and who, looking over Jerusalem, uttered His great compassion, will be so great in the midst of the adolescents of this country that they will forget everything else in the determination to make Him King of their lives. And I say to you that every agency which is at work today to achieve that end is worthy the consideration of that great body called the Church because He said when they said things to Him about those who tried to do things in His name, "Let them alone; those who are not against us are for us." We ought to use every agency that is a help to us, whatever the name, if it can open the eye of adolescence; and when that eye is open we have One greater than any hero they can find in the universe to present to them for their adoration and devotion, and they will accept Him.

But I must do it now. That prophet who said, "Strike while the

iron is hot'' knew what he was talking about. Let us strike while the iron is hot, hot with the passion of youth, hot with ambition, hot with the fever of accomplishment, hot with all the physical power of life; strike with a hand that is strong, with a heart that fears nothing, with a brain that is trained; strike while the iron is hot ere the years pass and the glow fades out of the iron and lies in your hand a cold and unresponsive thing, when blow upon blow may be rained upon it and it will mean nothing. Strike while the iron is hot in God's name and the name of the church.

RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO THE TEEN AGE

BISHOP EDWIN H. HUGHES, D.D., LL.D., SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. Theoretical work is nearly always well done. The imagination is a fine artist, and it deals largely in perfected products. We seldom see a nail driven into stubborn wood but that our fancy drives it more quickly and gracefully than does the actual hand wielding the actual hammer. This illustration applies to spiritual work. After men cease to be pastors and Sunday-school teachers they almost invariably become fountains whence flows instruction as to how sermons and lessons can be made vital. Editors redeem the world editorially; secretaries introduce the millenium secretarially; and bishops bring in the full Kingdom episcopally! Meantime the patient workers in a million obscure places are engaged in working out the problem practically. Their fine spirit is proven, not simply by the manner in which they stay by their task, but, also, by the manner in which they receive advices. Perhaps, after all, the best service that can be rendered them is to give their hearts the inspiration that tends to convert drudgery into a privilege and a joy.

In dealing with the "Relation of the Church to the Teen Age," your speaker approaches the theme, not as an expert authority, but rather as a modest student. There are no secret methods in such critical work; and there is no available magic. The Church has never yet found any automatic machinery. The only perpetual motion of the Kingdom is found in the action of the Holy Spirit and in that of consecrated human spirits. Concerning the decision of the first Christian Council it was written in the Book of the Acts: "It seemed good unto the Holy Ghost and to us': and the problem of winning the teen ages to Christ and his Church waits for such a sacred union as that.

Nor is evidence wanting that we are moving toward that union.

The problem must be solved in our desires and hopes ere it can be solved in our services. Scarcely any theme has evoked more speech and more literature in the last decade and a half. There has been wide and deep interest in the problem itself. Books that deal with it have been hailed with pathetic eagerness and have been registered among the best sellers in the religious markets. These books, many of them, have told us with elaborate exactness what we have always known! They have cast over their statistical tables the pale glamor of science. The average faithful teacher has been gratified by the results, largely because it is always gratifying to discover that science agrees so fully with one's self. This strengthens our faith in science quite as much as it adds to our own self-confidence! The chief benefit of our oral and written discussions has come from the new emphasis of the fact that the teen years are critical, and that they offer the best chance for the unholy tides that sweep lives away from God, as well as the best chance for those tides of the Spirit that sweep lives toward God. The inner factor of our problem has been largely solved. The Church does have a profound interest in this subject. The speaker and the author who bring real contributions to it do not lack for hearers and readers. Every great reform must be accomplished in the minds and hearts of men and women before it can be accomplished in their deeds and written in their laws. It is even so with reforms of religious work; they are won in convictions before they are achieved in performances. If our contentions be right, and if the Church of Christ is approaching the problem of winning the children in their teens, approaching it with a hearty concern and a deep purpose, the prayer of its heart will issue into the work of its hands.

In harmony with this movement outward toward the problem there seems to be a larger willingness in many quarters to fit the Church service to the teen age. We are slowly perceiving that it is hardly fair to expect the children to attend a service which is twenty-five years too old for them. When a fourteen-year-old boy is compelled to listen to a sermon intended wholly for a forty-four-year man there is a maladjustment! There is a story of a young boy who was made to read Pope's "Essay on Man." Mistaking even the title of the book he made this comment: "It may be very easy on man, but it's awfully hard on a boy." Preachers are often instructed to prepare their sermons with the faces and the lives of their audience in plain view before their minds. That audience usually includes some young people of the teen ages. Their faces and their lives should be seen and should influence the sermon's making. If we prepare our messages solely for

adults, we need waste no time wondering why the children do not come to Church. This is as absurd as it would be for the proprietor of a furnishing store that kept nothing but costumes for men and women to query why he did not get the trade of children. The wisest men feel that the habit of church-going should be cultivated early; and we all feel a sense of disappointment when we see the children leaving the church when the Sunday-school is over or coming to the church only when Sunday-school begins. It is easy to blame the children; easier to blame their parents; easiest to blame those who build a service not in the least calculated for the teen age.

Years ago a certain pastor began to preach a ten-minute sermon to the children each Sunday morning. This led him to simplify and humanize his discourses. Ere long he received a request from many of his older people to keep on preaching to children for the rest of the service inasmuch as they themselves were getting far more out of his simple messages than they were getting from his more complex utterances. One of the best things that could happen to the pulpit of today would be the realization of the necessity of returning somewhat to the simplicity that was in Christ-to parables like those of the Prodigal Son, the Lost Coin and Sheep, The Wedding Feast, and the Wise and Foolish Virgins. The preaching which draws and holds the teen children to the church service must be neither babyish nor oldish; it must just about fit the ordinary intelligence; and it must be concrete rather than abstract, illustrative rather than formally logical, and human rather than sub-human, unhuman, inhuman, or super-human.

This lesson applies to the Sunday-school service as well. If one goes into the kindergarten or primary departments, one is struck by the adaptation to the life of the little people. Picture cards tell their story. Blackboards offer some childish interest. Miniature lambs enter miniature folds. Wee chickens creep beneath the feathers of the mother. Small houses built on sand crumble to their fall. The gospel is offered in terms of the nursery.

In another department the messages come to the elders, made clear in the terms of their own lives. It uses the language of the farm, the parlor, the office, the market-place, and so is set full in the idioms of adult life. Now even the attendance of the full-grown depends not a little upon the appeal from their own lives back to their own lives again. So far as we have observed, kindergarten methods will not regularly command the attendance of octogenarians!

When we pass into the classes of the teens, we are apt to find that the work is not yet fully adapted to the age of the scholars. Plaster

sheep-folds will not work here; nor will learned discussions on doctrines and morals answer the purpose. The primer has gone; and philosophy has not yet arrived. We have milk for babes and meat for adults; but where is the intermediate food? Or, to change the figure, we have an occasional harpoon for a whale; a strong pointed steel for sturgeon or cod or muskellonge; an abundance of pin-hooks for the minnows; but have we the medium tackle and the intermediate bait? We will not press the metaphor too far lest it take us beyond our depth! The general meaning is plain. We cannot catch the teens until we make an appeal applicable to the teens. To expect aught else is to expect a miracle where God demands only careful thought and hard work.

We quickly admit that it is impossible to carry the sports of youth into the Church and Sunday-school as we carry thither the play of earlier childhood. The Church and the Vestry cannot be turned into Sunday baseball and football fields, even though the coach points out some religious lessons of the games! Sons of thunder are hard to manage in the place of peace! We must have some respect for the church building as a material structure, even though we accept Henry Drummond's statement that a "yard of boy is worth far more than a mile of carpet." But though it may be impossible to carry the sports of youth into the sacred rooms, it is not impossible to bring thither a spirit that understands youth and sympathizes with it; a host of illustrations based upon the life of youth; and a certain glad intensity of manner and method, and mind and heart, so that youth may feel that it is not being driven far from its own native realm.

The reason for the incarnation was that God should come down into our life; and the lesson of the incarnation applies more aptly and practically than many dream. There are teachers that have learned the art of Christ. In a real sense they become one with the teen period—with that awkward and graceful, timid and bold, happy and unhappy, humble and conceited, attractive and unattractive period ranging from thirteen to nineteen. They walk with their scholars over that strange road that leads from childhood to manhood and womanhood, knowing its bends and curves, its peaks and valleys, its lights and shadows, and most of all that radiant spot where youth meets Christ and knows Him as the man of joys, the guest and host at feasts and the Saviour of those hopeful days when the blood moves through the veins to the music of gladness. We talk much of graded lessons; and doubtless we do well. Yet we need, even more, graded teachers. We need teachers redeemed from religious morbidness, teach