These organizations that flourish in our modern church life naturally fall into three classes:  religious, semi-religious and welfare.  Other nomenclature, characterizing them might be used, and would be by their founders, but these words classify them for the purpose of our investigation.  The religious organizations have for their sole aim the deepening of the religious impulse, and the missionary objective of carrying this impulse to others.  The semi-religious are built around religious and symbolic heroes, make a bid for the heroic and the gang spirit, and seek to inculcate more or less of religious truth by the sugar-coat method.  The welfare type aims at the giving of all sorts of activity in order to keep the boy interested and busy, and so raise the tone of his life in general.

The religious type of organization includes the forms that may be classed under the church brotherhood idea—­the junior brotherhoods of various sorts.  They originated because of the need of some kind of expression for the religious impressions that were continually coming to the boy in his church life.  The idea was good, but its release poor.  Senior forms of organization were imitated, adult forms of worship and service diminutized, and juvenile copies of mature experience encouraged.  Junior brotherhoods and junior societies thus have tended to destroy the genuine, natural, spontaneous religious life of boys, and have unconsciously aided the culture of cant and religious unreality.

The semi-religious organizations have gone a full step beyond those of the religious type.  Societies like the Knights of King Arthur, Knights of the Holy Grail, Modern Knights of St. Paul, and others of such ilk have in symbolism sought to teach and find expression for the religious impulse.  The method has been more or less the religious type in disguise—­ancient titles, elaborate ritual, initiations, and degrees, red fire, fuss and feathers, and something doing all the time to attract the boy.  The result has been and is a play-idea of organization and a make-believe environment on the part of the boy.  In his thought it never classifies with his school or home or general church life.  It is a thing apart, some thing or place to retire to, to forget the everyday thing for a moment of romance.  The mature mind that is responsible for all of this, however, seeks to bend and use this make-believe world for the inculcation of religious truth; and the product is an astonishing variety of results.  Most of it is beyond the grasp of the ordinary man, the only man who at present or at any time will do this work in the church; and where set programs or ritual are followed the work itself loses its fire and misses its effectiveness.