These bare cliffs of primal personality have not yet undergone the abrasion of the glacial drift nor of the frost and the heat, the wind and the rain of long years.  They are angular, bold, defiant, and unsuited to the pastoral and agricultural scenes of middle life.  The grind of life with its slow accomplishment and failure has not as yet imparted caution and discretion.  Shrewd calculation and niggardliness too are normally absent.  Generous estimates prevail.  Idealism is passionate and turns its eye to summits that a life-time of devotion cannot scale.  Honor is held in high regard and select friendships may have the intensity of religion.  Judgments are without qualification.  Valor, laughter and fun, excess and the love of victory mingle in hot profusion.  Except in the case of the precocious boy of the street, the cold vices of cynicism, misanthropy, and avarice—­the reptilians of society—­are found almost exclusively among adults.  The younger brother is the prodigal.  Experience has not taught him how to value property and the main chance.

The failure of self-knowledge and self-control to keep pace with the rapid changes of bodily structure, sense-impressions, and mental organization is nowhere more marked and significant than in sex development; and the common experience of adolescent boys is to the effect that no other temptations equal in persistence and intensity those that attend and follow this awakening.  It is highly important, then, that, as preparation for dealing with the individual, the minister shall both see the generic boy upon the background of the past and that he shall also understand in some measure the physical basis and psychological ferment of the boy’s inevitable re-birth, not for the purpose of cheaply exploiting adolescence but in order that he may bring every life to its best in terms of personal character and of worth to the world.

CHAPTER III

The boy in village and country[2]

From the consideration of bodily health the village boy is better off than his city cousin.  He also enjoys to a far greater degree the protective and educative attention of real neighborhood life.  The opinions and customs which help to mold him are more personal.  He probably holds himself more accountable, for he can more readily trace the results of any course of action in terms of the welfare and good-will of well-known persons.  His relation to nature is also more nearly ideal.  Artificial restrictions, territorial and otherwise, are not so strictly imposed.  His lot favors a sane and normal view of life.  There are more chores to be done, more inviting occupations in the open, and altogether there may be a more wholesome participation in the work of maintaining the home than is possible for the city boy.