It was well thought and arranged by the ancients [says Martin Luther] that young people should exercise themselves and have something creditable and useful to do.  Therefore I like these two exercises and amusements best, namely, music and chivalrous games or bodily exercises, as fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, and others.....  With such bodily exercises one does not fall into carousing, gambling, and hard drinking, and other kinds of lawlessness, as are unfortunately seen now in the towns and at the courts.  This evil comes to pass if such honest exercises and chivalrous games are despised and neglected.

[Illustration:  WHAT SHALL WE PLAY?]

The feeling of harmony and bien-etre 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; and our city governments are hastening to acknowledge—­what has been too long ignored—­the right of every child to play.  It is only to be regretted that the play movement has not centered about our public schools for it constitutes a legitimate part of education.  The survivors who reach high school and college receive relatively a good deal of attention in physical training and organized play, but the little fellows of the elementary grades who have curvatures, retardation, adenoids, and small defects which cause loss of grade, truancy, and delinquency receive as yet very meager attention.

In dearth of opportunity and in cruel oversight of the normal play-needs of boyhood, there probably has never been anything equal to our modern American city.  But the cost of industrial usurpation in restricting the time and area of play is beginning to be realized; and the relation of the play-time and of the playground to health, happiness, morality, and later to industrial efficiency, begins to dawn upon our civic leaders.  If “recreation is stronger than vice,” it becomes the duty of religious and educational institutions to contribute directly and indirectly to normal recreative needs.

But what can the minister do?  He can help educate the church out of a negative or indifferent attitude toward the absorbing play-interests of childhood and youth.  He can publicly endorse and encourage movements to provide for this interest of young life and may often co-operate in the organization and management of such movements.  Every church should strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and power to such work and should receive through the same channels first-hand information of this form