But with the exception of a few boys’ clubs and scout patrols, for whose direction there is always a shameful shortage of willing and able lay leadership, the church has not as yet grasped the problem; and this remains true when one grants further the value of organized boys’ classes in the Sunday school and of the “socials” and parties of young people’s societies.  To be sure, the Protestant church, expressing itself through the Young Men’s Christian Association, has laid hold of the more respectable edge of the problem.  But with few exceptions this work is not as yet missionary, militant, or diffused to the communities of greatest need.  A few experiments are now being made, but probably the Y.M.C.A., more than the individual church, is under the necessity of treating the underlying economic evils with a very safe degree of caution; and in both there is the ever-recurrent need of an unsparing analysis of motive for the purpose of ascertaining which, after all, is paramount—­human welfare or institutional glory.

The tendency ever is to cultivate profitable and self-supporting fields and sound business policies.  But the case of thousands upon thousands of boys living in localities that are socially impoverished, unfortunate, and debasing constitutes a call to the missionary spirit and method.  If the impulse which is so ready and generous in the exportation of religion and so wise in adaptation to the interests and abilities of the foreign group could but lay hold of our most difficult communities with like devotion and with scientific care there would be developed in due time advanced and adequate methods, which in turn would take their rightful place as a part of civic or educational administration.

As is illustrated in both education and philanthropy, the function of the church in social development has been of this order, and the mistake of short-sighted religious leaders has been to desert these children when once they have found an abode within the civil structure.  The pastoral spirit of the new era claims again the entire parish, however organized, and guards its children still.  The pioneer is needed at home just as he is needed abroad, and the pioneering agency must have the same zeal and freedom in order to mark out the way of salvation for hordes of wild city boys who are the menacing product of blind economic haste.

[Illustration:  What will you do with me?]

The church should see this big problem and accept the challenge.  Society should awaken to the fact that in our large cities there is growing up a generation of boys who morally “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand”—­this through no fault of theirs, for they are but a product.  If they are unlovely, “smart,” sophisticated, ungrateful, and predatory, what has made them so?  Who has inverted the prophetic promise and given them ashes for beauty and the spirit of heaviness for the garment of praise?  As matters now stand it is not the ninety and nine who are safe and the one in peril.  That ratio tends to be reversed, and will be unless right-minded people accept individually and in their organized relations a just responsibility for the new life that is committed for shaping and destiny to the evolving modern city.