What should the Sunday school do to achieve this?  Reach to the utmost, strive to the uttermost, use every resource, redeem every opportunity, create, discover and harness every method, hold the boy to his best, patiently see him develop, give him the material and spiritual elements for his growth, afford him opportunity to find himself, help him to crystalize his thought for life and lovingly aid him to meet, know and acknowledge his Lord.

Thus the boy will be “built up in our most holy faith”—­the faith that loves and serves in healthy life for the joy of living.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE BOY’S SPIRITUAL LIFE

Alexander (Editor).—­Boy Training (Chapter on “The Goal of Adolescence”) (.75).

Sunday School and the Teens (Chapter on “The Church’s Provision for Adolescent Spiritual Life”) ($1.00).

Boys’ Work Message, Men and Religion Movement (Chapters on “The Boy’s Religious Needs” and “The Message of Christianity to Boyhood”) ($1.00).

XIX

THE TEEN AGE TEACHER[11]

The greatest problem that faces the Sunday school and Church as it seeks to meet the needs of the boys and girls of the teen age is leadership.  The organized men’s and women’s Bible classes may meet that need.  In fact, the success and ultimate value of these classes lie in their response and ability to face and supply this growing need.

God works best through incarnation.  When he wanted to tell men who he was, what he was, and how he wanted men to live, he spoke through prophets, priests, patriarchs, and kings, and the Old Testament writings came to us this way.  However, men did not seem to understand the message, and for nearly four hundred years he ceased to speak.  Then, “in the fullness of time,” he came himself in the person of his own Son—­born in the womb after the fashion of a human baby, passed through boyhood in the likeness of a boy and on into manhood as a man—­to teach us who he was, what he was, and how he wanted us to live; and Jesus is just God spelling himself out in human history in the language that men understand.  This is incarnation, and as he was compelled to pour himself out into man to reveal himself to men, so men and women who have seen him must literally pour themselves out—­incarnate themselves—­into the lives of growing boys and girls if these boys and girls of the teen age are to know him.

Leadership has always been the cry of the world and the Church, and the history of both is written in biography.  The Pharaoh, the Caesar, Charlemagne, Peter the Great, William the Silent, Henry of Navarre, Queen Elizabeth, Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers, Washington, Lincoln, and the names of the great on the world’s scroll of fame tell the world’s story.  The Christ, Peter, John, Paul, Augustine, Savonarola, Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli, Knox, Roger, Williams, Wesley, Finney, Moody, Booth; and “what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of ‘those’ of whom the world was not worthy,” and whose splendid achievements fill out the glorious history of the Church—­these, all of these, in their life and effort constitute the story of the Kingdom.