The welfare type of organizations has multiplied in the past few years, and their less religious activities have served to keep the religious and semi-religious types alive.  The Boys’ Brigade, the National First Aid Association, the Woodcraft Indians, Sons of Daniel Boone, Boy Scouts, and others of like type, are in season and out of season appealing to American boyhood.  Their aim is not specific, but general and vague:  “Something to do, something to think about, something to enjoy, with a view always to character-building.”  Their appeal is mostly to the physical and the out-of-doors; their philosophy that of the recapitulation of the culture epochs.  Their promoters do not claim that they touch all of life.  They seek to dominate the leisure time only, and to produce goodness by affording no free time for positive wrong-doing.  The domination is also physical expression, and the mental and spiritual in the boy and his home, school, and church life are not vitally affected directly.

All three types, however, have done splendid work in the past, and are rendering good service in the present as they will in the future.  The success of each depends entirely on its leadership.  If a leader be steeped in the Idylls of the King, the Knights of King Arthur will be popular with the boys and the church.  If the superintendent of the brotherhood or society be human and magnetic, the church and the boy will sing its praises.  If the scoutmaster is an out-of-door man and has a point of contact with the boy, the Boy Scouts will be the solution of all our difficulties.  Here lies the crux of the whole matter.  If boys are added to the church through any organization, it is not because of the method, but because of the worker of the method.  The method counts because it is part of the worker—­is in his blood.

=Method=

The aim of all church work should be the production not merely of manhood but Christian manhood.  The vision is to see the boy a Christ-like boy—­a physically, socially, mentally and spiritually balanced man in the making.  The organizations used, then, in boys’ work should be selected with this aim in mind.

Again, modern psychology has demonstrated to us that all boy activities must be graded according to each stage of a boy’s development, and that there are several such stages.  In the adolescent boy these may roughly be classed as the heroic and reflective stages, or as early, middle, and late adolescence.  Boy activities, then, must group themselves to minister to the needs of each separate stage in order to work effectively.  But psychology has also shown us that the activities of any one stage must also be graded to meet the needs of that one stage.  Thus the heroic may run from the twelfth to the fifteenth year, and the activities of this phase should be graded to meet the development of the phase.  This is well illustrated by the Tenderfoot Second Class Scout and First Class Scout degrees of the Boy Scouts which operate in this period.