To this question more than one answer could be given, but there is one answer which needs to be well considered.  One reason is that these men and women fail to discern, in the life round about them, the reality of the thing which we offer them.  For Christianity is, as we have seen in these studies, not only an individual experience, but a social fact.  And while we might not be qualified to judge whether the individual experience, in any given case, is genuine, we could see the social fact, if it were in sight.  That social fact would be profoundly interesting to us, and it would be convincing.  Nothing else is likely to convince us.  In truth, we cannot understand Christianity at all until we see it in operation in society.  One man alone cannot give any idea of what it is.  As some one has said, one man and God will give us all that is essential in any other religion, but Christianity requires for Its operation at least two men and God.  In fact, it takes a good many men and women and children, living together in all sorts of relations, to give any adequate exhibition of it.  What we need, then, first of all, to convince men of its reality, is a good sample of it, in active operation—­a great variety of good samples, indeed.  When we have these to show, we can get people interested.

It would be difficult, if a very homely illustration may be permitted, to enlist the interest of any boy in baseball if you made it with him an individual matter.  You might try to train him for any given position on the field, but if he undertook to study it out alone it would not be easy for him to understand it.  In fact, it would be impossible.  No one could learn the game all alone.  The team work is the whole of it.  And it would be absurd to expect any one to become interested in the game unless he could see it played.

To take a similar illustration from a somewhat higher form of art, you would not be likely to succeed in awakening enthusiasm in any one for orchestral music by giving him his individual part of the score to study and play over by himself.  No matter what his instrument might be, the solitary performance of the part assigned to it would be the dryest possible business.  You could not convert any man to the love of orchestral music by any such process.  But if he could hear all the instruments played together, and, better still, if he could play in with all the rest, that might be inspiring.

So you need not expect to convert any man to Christianity unless you can show him Christianity at work in human society.  In considering only the individual application of it, its whole meaning and significance would be hidden from him.  The team work is all there is of it.  Let him see it in active operation, and it will awaken his enthusiasm.

This is, in fact, the essence of the new evangelism to which the young men and women of this day are called.  Their business will be to take Christianity out into the field of the world and set it at work.  It is for this that the leadership is intrusted to them.  The church has been a long time coming to this, but it seems at last to be arriving, and the young people of this generation will be summoned to the great undertaking.  Surely they may feel that a high honor and a heavy responsibility are thus put upon them.  It is the most heroic enterprise to which the sons of men have ever been called.