I fancy that you, like me, when you see a fine dashing young fellow, with a touch of honesty and recklessness and wonderful mystery of youth in his eyes, love him as a brother, and long to do something to keep him clean, and to keep him from the sordid things to which you and I know well enough he will descend in the long run if one cannot put the love of clean, wholesome life into his heart.  But how to get at him?  If you talk to him about his soul you disgust him, and you feel a sort of sneaking sympathy with him too.  It does not seem the thing to make a chap self-conscious and a bit of a prig when he is not one to start with.  On the other hand, if you just keep to buns and cinemas you never get any farther.  Well, it is a big difficulty.  The only experience that I have had which counts at all is experience that I gained while trying to run a boys’ club in South London, and you must not think me egotistical if I tell you what seems to me to have been the secret of any power that I seem to have had over fellows.

At first I used to have a short service at the close of the club every evening, to which most of the boys used to stay.  I also had a service on Sunday afternoon.  Something of the same sort might perhaps be possible in the Y.M.C.A. tent if there is one where you are.  When I was talking to them at these services I always used to try and make them feel that Christ was the fulfilment of all the best things that they admired, that He was their natural hero.  I would tell them some story of heroism and meanness contrasted, of courage and cowardice, of noble forgiveness and vile cruelty, and so get them on the side of the angels.  Then I would try and spring it upon them that Christ was the Lord of the heroes and the brave men and the noble men, and that He was fighting against all that was mean and cruel and cowardly, and that it was up to them to take their stand by His side if they wanted to make the world a little better instead of a little worse, and I would try to show them how in little practical ways in their homes and at their work and in the club they could do a bit for Christ.

Well, they listened pretty well, and I think that they agreed in a general sort of way, only ’they knew that I was a richish man in comparison with them, and that I didn’t have their difficulties to contend with, and that all tended to undo the effect of what I had said.  And then accident gave me a sort of clue to the way to get them to take one seriously.  For some idiotic reason—­I really couldn’t say just what it was—­I dressed up as a tramp one day, and spent a night in a casual ward.  I didn’t do it for any very worthy motive, and I didn’t mean any one to know about it; but it got round, and I suddenly found that it had caught the imaginations of some of the fellows, and I realized that if one was to have any power over them one must do symbolic things to show them that one meant what one said about love being really better than money, and all that sort of thing.