BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TEMPERANCE AND THE TEEN AGE

Chappel.—­Evils of Alcohol (.60).

Horsely.—­Alcohol and the Human Body ($1.00).

Jewett.—­Control of Body and Mind (Concerning Cigarettes) (.60).

Scientific Temperance Journal (Monthly) (.60 per year).

Towns.—­Injury of Tobacco (Pamphlet, $1.50 per hundred).

XVIII

BUILDING UP THE BOY’S SPIRITUAL LIFE

The business of the Sunday school is the letting loose of moral and religious impulses for life—­the raising of the life, by information, inspiration and opportunity, to its highest possible attainment.  The very highest reach that any boy’s life can attain is the ideal of life that Jesus has set forth.  Nothing less than this can be the aim of the Sunday school.  Analyzing this ideal, we find that this means that the boy must physically, socially, mentally, and religiously find the best, build it into his life, and attain unto the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”  Anything that does not contribute to this end, in the principle or method of the Sunday school, is wrong.  Likewise, anything, tradition or prejudice, that keeps the school from reaching the boy for the Christ-ideal is a positive affront to the Lord of the Church.  The Sunday school deals with a living, breathing boy—­not a theory, but a real combination of flesh, bone, muscle, nerve and blood.  It must minister to the needs of this combination in a generous way, with physical, through-the-week activities, not to induce it to attend Sunday school for worship and Bible study, but because the highest good of the combination demands these things.  The school also should see that this living, breathing boy, who, by God’s law of life, thinks and moves by his thought, should receive the best opportunity to develop his mind by supporting the state institutions in the community for that purpose, and also in providing culture, recreation-education within the confines of its own particular sphere.  In addition to this, recognizing that the boy belongs to the social life of the community, and “that no man liveth unto himself or dieth unto himself,” the Sunday school must recognize its obligation to the community, as well as to the boy, and furnish him an opportunity for the best social adjustment.  The Kingdom of God is a saved community of saved lives.  It is best represented in the Scriptures as a city, a golden city, without death, crying, or sorrow, all of them intensely social things, as are their opposites, also.  Every lesson the school gives the boy socially, every chance it affords him to learn by contact with his fellows of either sex, means just one more effort for the Kingdom.  Moreover, the Kingdom is a community of saved bodies, saved minds, saved social relations and saved spirits, or a place or group where the best dominates—­the will of God rules over all