It is part of the minister’s task to work for a better day in this as in every phase of moral achievement.  Next to the physician he best knows the mental and physical suffering, the moral defeat, and the awful injustice to women and children whom the libertine pollutes with incurable diseases.  If he is a true pastor, he will strive to keep the boys pure through expert instruction to parents, through personal advice, through wholesome activity and recreation, through courses on sexual hygiene in the public schools, through war on indecency in billboard, dance, and theater, through absolute chastity of speech, and, in general, through an ideal of life and service which shall lift the boys’ ambitions out of the low and unhealthy levels of sense gratification.  To put the spiritual nature in control is his high and sacred opportunity.

The importance of the minister’s part in this struggle for the body and soul of youth is based upon the fact that in this critical encounter there is no aid that is comparable with religion.  Thousands of honest, serious-minded men frankly confess that in modern conditions they see little hope of this battle being won without religion as a sanction of right conduct.  The boy needs God, a God to whom he can pray in the hour of temptation.  He needs to regard his life with all its powers as God’s investment, which he must not squander or pervert.

Here, as everywhere else in boy-life, the loyalty appeal, which, as nothing else, will keep him true to mother and father, to society, and to God, stands the religious leader in good stead.  Upon honor he will not violate the confidence of his parents, and the trust imposed in him by his Maker.  Upon honor he will deport himself toward the opposite sex as he would wish other boys to regard his own sister; and the religious teacher has it within his power, if he will keep in touch with boys, to create and preserve an ideal of manly chivalry that will effectively withstand both the insidious temptations of secret sin and the bolder inducements of social vice.

This can never be done by the formal work of the pulpit alone.  Nothing but the influence of a pure, strong man, mediated in part through the parents of the boy, supported by scientific facts, and operating directly on the boy’s life, through the mighty medium of a personal friendship, can perform this saving ministry.  If there were nothing more to be gained through intimate acquaintance with boys than thus fortifying them in this one inevitable and prolonged struggle, it would warrant all the energy and time consumed in the minister’s attempt to enter into the hallowed friendship and frank admiration of the boys of his parish.