of constructive and preventive philanthropy.  He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies organized in connection with his own church.  He can plead for a real and longer childhood in behalf of Christ’s little ones who are often sacrificed through commercial greed, un-Christian business ambition, educational blindness, and ignorance.  He can preach a gospel that does not set the body over against the soul, science over against the Bible, and the church over against normal life; but embraces every child of man in an imperial redemption which is environmental and social as well as individual, physical as well as spiritual.  In short, he can study and serve his community, not as one who must keep an organization alive at whatever cost, but as one who must inspire and lead others to obey the Master whose only reply to our repeated protestations of love is, “Feed my lambs.”

CHAPTER VI

THE BOY’S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]

It is practically impossible to overemphasize the importance of the boy’s vocational choice.  Next to his attitude toward his Maker and his subsequent choice of a life partner this decision controls his worth and destiny.  For it is not to be supposed that play with all its virtue, its nourish and exercise of nascent powers, and its happy emancipation into broader and richer living can adequately motivate and permanently ennoble the energies of youth.  Until some vocational interest dawns, education is received rather than sought and will-power is latent or but intermittently exercised.  Play has a great orbit, but every true parent and educator seeks to know the axis of a given life.

For some boys presumably of high-school age and over, this problem becomes real and engrossing, but for the vast majority there is little intelligent choice, no wise counsel, no conscious fronting of the profoundly religious question of how to invest one’s life.  The children of ease graduate but slowly, if at all, from the “good-time” ideal, while the children of want are ordinarily without option in the choice of work.  But for all who, being permitted and helped, both seek and find then-proper places in the ranks of labor, life becomes constructively social and therefore self-respecting.  To be able to do some bit of the world’s work well and to dedicate one’s self to the task is the individual right of every normal youth and the sure pledge of social solvency.  Ideally an art interest in work for its own sake should cover the whole field of human labor, and in proportion as each person finds a task suited to his natural ability and is well trained for that task does he lift himself from the grade of a menial or a pauper and enter into conscious and worthy citizenship.

Here then, as in the case of the mating instinct, the vocational quest rightly handled forces the ego by its very inclination and success into the altruism of a social order.  For it is the misfits, the vocationally dormant, the defeated, and those who, however successful, have not considered such choice as an ethical concern of religion that make up the anti-social classes of the present time.