And back they came with the tattered Thing, as
       children after play,
    And they said:  “The soul that he got from God he has
       bartered clean away. 
    We have threshed a stook of print and book, and
       winnowed a chattering wind
    And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we
       cannot find: 
    We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have
       seared him to the bone,
    And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul
       of his own.”

Fortunately, however, ministerial professionalism is on the wane.  Protestantism, in its more democratic forms, rates the man more and the office less, and present-day tests of practical efficiency are adverse to empty titles and pious assumption.  To be “Reverend” means such character and deeds as compel reverence and not the mere “laying on of hands.”  Work with boys discovers this basis, for there is no place for the holy tone in such work, nor for the strained and vapid quotation of Scripture, no place for excessively feminine virtues, nor for the professional hand-shake and the habitual inquiry after the family’s health.  In a very real sense many a minister can be saved by the boys; he can be saved from that invidious classification of adult society into “men, women, and ministers,” which is credited to the sharp insight of George Eliot.

The minister is also in need of a touch of humor in his work.  The sadness of human failure and loss, the insuperable difficulties of his task, the combined woes of his parish, the decorum and seriousness of pulpit work—­all operate to dry up the healthy spring of humor that bubbled up and overran in his boyhood days.  What health there is in a laugh, what good-natured endurance in the man whose humor enables him to “side-step” disastrous and unnecessary encounters and to love people none the less, even when they provoke inward merriment.  The boys’ pastor will certainly take life seriously, but he cannot take it somberly.  Somewhere in his kind, honest eye there is a glimmer, a blessed survival of his own boyhood.

So, being ministered to by the comradeship of boys, he retains his sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor.  Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams of living water and into the whispering woods he catches again the wild charm of that all-possible past:  the smell of the campfire, the joyous freedom and good health of God’s great out-of-doors.  Genius and success in life depend largely upon retaining the boyish quality of enthusiastic abandon to one’s cause, the hearty release of one’s entire energy in a given pursuit, and the conviction that the world is ever new and all things possible.  The thing in men that defies failure is the original boy, and “no man is really a man who has lost out of him all the boy.”