Before receiving boys into active church membership it is well that they be given a course of instruction in a preparatory class.  Only so can the fundamentals of religion and the duties of church membership be intelligently grasped.  The value to the boy is also enhanced when the ceremony of induction is made formal and impressive to a degree that shall not be surpassed in his entrance into any other organization.  By all means the boy should not be neglected after he has been received into the church.  Mistakes of this sort are common wherever undue importance attaches to the conversion experience, and the numerical ideal of church success prevails.  If the task becomes too great for the pastor let him find a responsible “big brother” for every boy received into the church.

As the critical or skeptical traits of youth develop in later adolescence the intellectual formulas and supports of religion will be overhauled.  What the boy has brought over out of the early imitative and memorizing period of life will probably come up for review in later adolescence.  If his inherited theology corresponds to experience and verifies itself in the light of the scientific methods of school and college no great difficulty will be experienced.  But if it does not square with the youth’s set of verifiable facts then there is added to his necessary moral struggle for self-possession and spiritual control the unnecessary and dangerous quest for a new faith, so that he is forced to swap horses in midstream and when the spring freshet is on.

Possibly this reorganization involved in the adolescent flux and reflection cannot be altogether avoided, but with proper care much could be done to lessen its dangers and to preserve a substantial continuity of religious experience from childhood through youth and to the end of life.  It is a help not to have to be introduced to an altogether new God in these succeeding stages.  To preserve his identity enriches and safeguards the life.

The imagination and wonder instinct of the child, his use of “natural religion,” his confirmation in habits of prayer, reverence, and worship, his acquisition of choice religious literature by memorizing—­can these interests be properly cared for without putting upon him a theological yoke which will subsequently involve pain and perhaps apostasy?

It is undoubtedly easier to point out the desirability of furnishing childhood with the materials of a time-proof religion than to provide such an instrument.  And it is less difficult to criticize the indiscriminate use of the Bible in instructing the young than to set forth the type of education in religion which will satisfy alike the mental requirements of childhood and youth.  What course should be followed with the pre-adolescent boy in order that the youth may be not less but more religious?