The Minister and the Boy | Page 3

very nature of theological discipline. Moreover, he is occupied particularly with those affairs of the inner life which are as intangible as they are important. His relation with people is largely a Sunday relation, or at any rate a religious one, and he meets them on the pacific side. Very naturally they reveal to him their best selves, and, true to Christian charity and training, he sees the best in everyone. If the women of his parish receive more than their proper share of attention the situation is proportionately worse. It follows that the minister needs the most wholesome contact with stern reality in order to offset the subtle drift toward a remote, theoretical, or sentimental world. In this respect commercial life is more favorable to naturalness and virility; while a fair amount of manual labor is conducive to sanity, mental poise, and sound judgment as to the facts of life. The minister must have an elemental knowledge of and respect for objective reality; and he must know human nature.
Now among all the broad and rich human contacts that can put the minister in touch with vital realities there is none so electric, so near to revelation as the boy. Collectively he is frank to the point of cruelty and as elemental as a savage. Confronted alone and by the minister, who is not as yet his chum, he reveals chiefly the minister's helplessness. Taken in company with his companions and in his play he is a veritable searchlight laying bare those manly and ante-professional qualities which must underlie an efficient ministry. Later life, indeed, wears the mask, praises dry sermons, smiles when bored, and takes careful precautions against spontaneity and the indiscretions of unvarnished truth; but the boy among his fellows and on his own ground represents the normal and unfettered reaction of the human heart to a given personality. The minister may be profoundly benefited by knowing and heeding the frank estimate of a "bunch" of boys. They are the advance agents of the final judgment; they will find the essential man. May it not be with him as with Kipling's Tomlinson, who, under the examination of both "Peter" and the "little devils," was unable to qualify for admission either to heaven or hell:
And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play, And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away. We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find: We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone, And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own."
Fortunately, however, ministerial professionalism is on the wane. Protestantism, in its more democratic forms, rates the man more and the office less, and present-day tests of practical efficiency are adverse to empty titles and pious assumption. To be "Reverend" means such character and deeds as compel reverence and not the mere "laying on of hands." Work with boys discovers this basis, for there is no place for the holy tone in such work, nor for the strained and vapid quotation of Scripture, no place for excessively feminine virtues, nor for the professional hand-shake and the habitual inquiry after the family's health. In a very real sense many a minister can be saved by the boys; he can be saved from that invidious classification of adult society into "men, women, and ministers," which is credited to the sharp insight of George Eliot.
The minister is also in need of a touch of humor in his work. The sadness of human failure and loss, the insuperable difficulties of his task, the combined woes of his parish, the decorum and seriousness of pulpit work--all operate to dry up the healthy spring of humor that bubbled up and overran in his boyhood days. What health there is in a laugh, what good-natured endurance in the man whose humor enables him to "side-step" disastrous and unnecessary encounters and to love people none the less, even when they provoke inward merriment. The boys' pastor will certainly take life seriously, but he cannot take it somberly. Somewhere in his kind, honest eye there is a glimmer, a blessed survival of his own boyhood.
So, being ministered to by the comradeship of boys, he retains his sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn bathos; knows how to meet important committees on microscopic reforms as well as self-appointed theological inquisitors and all the insistent cranks that waylay a busy pastor. Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams of living water and into the