Educational evangelism; the religious discipline for youth

Preface

The following essay endeavors to develop, briefly and suggestively, a conception of the religious discipline that is to be regarded as most fitting and desirable for the years of adolescence in view of the spiritual experiences through which nature conducts the young soul on the road to maturity. The standpoint is not that of an expert scientific investigator, but that of one bound to a goodly company of youth by ties of personal sympathy. The writer has done his best, however, for their sakes, to profit by the scientific investigation of the phenomena of youth, and his indebtedness to all those who, in recent years, have written so ably upon adolescence and religious psychology — Hall, James, Starbuck, Coe, Granger, and many more — is manifest on every page. Not so manifest, perhaps, but quite 5

PEEFACE as worthy of acknowledgment, are his obligations to the remarkable book by Charles Wagner entitled " Youth," to which he owes some of the initial insights of this study.

He ventures, however, to presume that the reader will be able to discern, without the aid of further acknowledgments, the extent of these various obligations, and to judge for himself whether, deducting the evident liabilities, there remain in the volume any net assets of sound thinking or suggestive insight. He is guilty also of presuming that the standpoint which he occupies may furnish something worth saying, even to one all inexpert in the methods of the laboratory and the use of the questionnaire. Love is sometimes more penetrating than research, and things have been revealed to babes that were not discovered by the wise and prudent. And if it should be said that in forsaking the methods of exact science to follow the guidance of sym-

PEEFACB pathetic insight, the author is turning from the light of day to wander in the dark, his sufficient consolation would be the fact that night also has its wonderful disclosures, for then

** The sky is fiUed with stars, invisible by day.'^

Note. — Chapter III reproduces some of the thought and language of an address at the Bushnell Centennial in Hartford in 1902, published in the commemorative volume. Chapter VIII likewise contains the substance of an address published in Men of To-morrow for January, 1901. Both chapters are wholly different in conception, plan and development from the addresses out of which they grew.

Contents

I. An Introduction to Youth

II. The Drama of Youth .

III. The Genesis of Christian Character

CHAPTER I An Introduction to Youth

" I WOULD there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest ! "

It is one of the imperishable memories of college days. The professor in the Shakespeare class was calling for choice passages from a play assigned for private reading, a bland smile playing over his features as we gave our patronizing approval to this and that specimen of the great dramatist's work, varied, however, now and then, with a snap of the eyes that threatened to break his glasses.

Did I overestimate the personal tone that my classmate put into these words which he quoted, as if they expressed his views exactly ? Possibly ; for I, too, was sick of be- II ing a boy, eager to be a man. And I was half convinced — what youth is not? — that all professors and older people generally cherish a lurking approval of the shepherd's maledictory wish.

For is not youth the troublesome age? Is it not the self-conceited, smart, restless, wayward, rebellious age, the age for which mature people have least sympathy, of which youth itself has most dread? And is not the keenest pain of youth just this, that while the grown folks may find it uncomfortable to have a big boy in the house, they do not seem to understand that it is many times more uncomfortable to be the big boy ?

What is youth ? A wide, deep river, dividing childhood from manhood ; a river which, like the river of death, must be crossed without bridge or boat; through which each soul must go ; into whose turbid waters the child must descend alone, knowing well that beneath their flood his childhood will be buried to rise no more; a stream both broad and turbulent, not to be crossed in a day or a year ; whose buoyant waters will indeed bear him up, but not with-

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out his efforts ; whose currents will land him somewhere on the other shore, but, oh, so far down stream, on the dusty plains of sordid, sinful manhood, far out of sight of those green hills of childhood that were so near to heaven.

Only by some such figure can we picture to ourselves this wide interval between the child and the man. It is a time when all is fluid, restless, changing, nothing settled or fixed, no foundation sure ; when one is carried off his feet, away from the moorings of early years, and swept towards he knows not what destiny by strange, new currents of life that he does not comprehend ; a fascinating, wondrous time of freshness and bloom, when unmeasured continents of power are discovered in the soul, opening up boundless possibilities, and new visions of life and its meaning come sweeping daily before the spirit's eyes as one is borne along to viewpoints ever new ; a time of exhilaration and suspense, while forces of nature beyond control rush one forward in the resistless progress toward a goal that is hidden as yet from sight.

Youth has been maligned ; because it is easier for Shakespeare's shepherd — and others — to grumble than to understand.

For the fact is that youth is still the portion of human life least understood. Lovers of children are we all, but downright lovers of youth are few. The dullest heart responds to the appeal of childhood, but only the discerning kindle at contact with youth. The last century w^as the children's era. Child-life has had its prophets and interpreters. Froebel and Robert Raikes and Horace Bushnell and Horace Mann have had a multitude of followers. The study of the child's mind has been exalted to a science ; the interests of childhood have been amply set forth, its rights ably defended ; elementary education has been revolutionized, and the world has been led at last to a respectable understanding of the needs and nature of the child.

But many of the phenomena of youth are still regarded with uncomprehending amazement. The attitude of the majority toward youth is about this : " Childhood we know, and manhood we know ; but who, or what,

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art thou ? " The largest part of mankind is waiting for an introduction to youth ; they are still strangers after all. But there are those who are seeking an acquaintance in all seriousness. They no longer assume that they know youth. Youth is no longer to be taken for granted and ignored. The inductive study of the mind and spirit of youth is being pursued with a zeal that is according to knowledge and a zest that falters at no difficulty or magnitude in the work to be done. Many influences have conspired to bring the interests and problems of youthful life before the world as never before. The study of the mind of the child was certain to lead, in time, to more thorough investigation of the special characteristics of youth ; the development of primary education made imperative a reformation of secondary education, which in turn called for a better understanding of the native interests and essential needs of those in the formative period of adolescence ; the rapid rise of young people's religious societies compelled thoughtful attention to the serious problems which they raised ; and expert scientists have already done an epoch-making work to promote a better understanding of the mind of youth.

The unique and distinctive character of this period, the nature of the process by which the child becomes a man, the order of development and the character of the successive changes that take place, are now defined with far greater precision than ever before. The way is clear for that better acquaintance with youth which is in every way so desirable. Our present purpose is to look into the naturally ordered spiritual experience of youth, and seek therein for hints to help in the religious treatment of those who are passing through these restless years. The effort can hardly be fruitless ; and it will be richly worth while if it should lead some who are impatient with the ways of youth to repent of having ever wished that there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty.

By the spiritual experience of youth we are to understand that inward experience, howsoever affected by influences from without, by which a personal character is formed.

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The formation of his individual, personal character is the supreme work of youth. The method may be that of the natural unfolding of the character implicit in his childhood's virtues, or that of personal enrichment in character through entrance into a more complex life, or that of the radical alteration of character to suit a changed environment as he passes from youth to manhood, or that of a revolution that changes his character for good or ill at all its cardinal points in a day ; in any case, the business of character-forming is youth's greatest concern, and the character with which he issues into the field of manhood is his best capital or his heaviest drag in later life.

Now the process of character-formation is not to be viewed apart from the other interests and tasks of youth. It goes hand in hand with the transformation of the child in body, mind and spirit into a man. At every stage it is profoundly influenced,where it is not actually controlled, by the factors then dominant in the general process. The entire process of transformation extends over a period of ten or a dozen years, from the age of thirteen onward, beginning and ending earlier, as everybody knows, with girls than with boys. Within these years a certain order of development is practically universal, making possible a division of youth itself into three distinct periods. The beginning and ending of these periods are not at all distinctly marked, nor are the interests of one excluded from the others; yet the special character of each is plain. If we divide the entire time between the end of childhood and the beginning of maturity into three nearly equal periods, and call the first the physical, the second the mental, and the third the social period of adolescence, we shall have a rough framework for our study, a broad outline which is yet accurate enough for our present general purpose.

In the first of these periods, say from the thirteenth to the seventeenth year, the formation of character is profoundly influenced by bodily growth. It is the time of most rapid, often of sudden and surprising, physical development. Growth is often dispropor-

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tionate, and size comes faster than strength. When a boy suddenly shoots up tall and slender, with shoulders too narrow for his height and hands and feet too large for the limbs that carry them, and all his frame loose in the joints, how could it be possible for him to display the moral character or have the spiritual experiences of a curly-headed, round-faced child, or of a well-knit man? The development of the physical differences in the sexes in this period is accompanied by the appearance of marked differences in their mental and moral natures. When w^e remember that " the hot blood of youth " is not a figure of speech but a literal fact, the temperature of the body in adolescence being about a degree higher than in earlier or later years, we should know better than to expect from the youth either the quiet submissiveness of the child or the cool judgment of the man. When we think how nature dowers youth with seemingly inexhaustible supplies of new energy, repairing all their prodigal waste with lavish hand, so that they rush into exhausting contests and foolhardy adventures with undoubting assurance of their ability to make good all losses, we are not so much surprised that they should take, without a thought of danger, moral risks that to older heads are simply appalling. And when we reflect that, do the best she can, nature cannot transform the body of a boy into that of a man in less than ten years' time, we may be disposed to exercise more patience with the seemingly slow progress of our young people in moral and spiritual attainment.

Mental development is rapid from the beginning of youth, and physical development is not complete until the end of the period ; but as rapid physical growth dominates the early, so rapid mental growth dominates the middle years of adolescence. The unfolding of the mental powers is even more intimately associated with the development of character than physical growth. The larger mental vision requires a readjustment of the ideals of life. The youth begins to reason, to follow intricate and elaborate processes of argument, to form judgments based on a more and more extended view of facts and principles. Delighting in

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his independence of thought, he takes pleasure in questioning the wisdom of others, and in confuting their statements. He shapes his own convictions, and often shows a greater confidence in his own conclusions than their merit warrants. The kindling of imagination places before his mind a set of ideals and ambitions, self-discovered and self -chosen, which henceforth dominate the moral and spiritual movements of his being. The emotional awakening that accompanies this increase of mental breadth and reach is also of vast significance for character. That disturbance of the emotional equilibrium, that agitation of a soul dragged hither and thither by conflicting impulses and desires, which is known as the " storm and stress " of the spirit, now reaches its height. The youth who as a child was entertained with hero tales, admired the heroes and dreaded the villains, now feels it in himself to be in very truth, not in childish play, a hero or a villain, or both. His intensified self-consciousness makes him by turns bashful and bold, diffident and boastful, secretive and assertive. With overweening sense of the value of his new-found personal self, he may become heartlessly selfish ; or the altruisticfeelings may win dominion over him, and make him more than ever a loving son, a devoted brother, a generous friend.

But the full dominance of the altruistic feelings belongs to the last or social period of youth. That is the time when one finds his place and settles to his work in the world, when the life reaches out beyond oneself and he learns to know himself as a factor in the life of the community, when he enters responsibly upon his social and civic duties as a citizen. The social impulse that rules this time is, of course, most conspicuously displayed in the relations of the sexes. In early adolescence the boys and girls part company by instinct ; totally diverse interests come to control the two sexes for a time. But in the social period there is a gradual return to common interests and mutual understanding, to likeness of tastes and feelings, an approach that culminates in the love-making and the mating of young men and women to create new social centers in homes of their own. All this cannot but

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have much to do with the inner spiritual experience that finally issues in a settled character. It is to be certainly expected that altruistic and social considerations will now exert great influence on the process of character-formation, and that the rise of the social instincts to controlling power, and the adjustment of young lives to their place and work in the world, will be accompanied by marked decisions and significant definitions that go far to give personal character its final form.

This introduction to the distinctive interests of the different periods of youth is sufficient to show that the spiritual experience of youth must be something great and deep and infinitely varied. He who would explore it will be led into a forest w^ide and dark, which is for some a wilderness, with many a bog and fen, and many a trackless waste. Many and devious are the paths that lead through it, highways and byways of the soul in its journey from childhood to maturity ; uncharted mostly, and some untraversed save by one who goes his way alone. Yet all these myriad paths, these countless forms of experience, despite their infinite variety, have one general trend ; they all lead through the forest ; by this way or by that, with many turnings or with few, the youth emerges at last from the forest shades into the broad light of manhood's open plain.

Our next step, therefore, will be the endeavor to sketch an outline map of the journey as a whole. Ignoring the fascinating details of the personal adventures of individual travelers through this forest, we shall note the general trend of their various paths, mark the points that all must pass, and observe the places of peculiar danger or promise. In other w^ords, we shall attempt a general outline of the typical, essential, spiritual experiences through which we are to expect the youth to pass on his way from childhood to maturity, and in which the laws of his spiritual education are to be discerned.

CHAPTER II The Drama of Youth

During the years that divide childhood from maturity, there is enacted in the soul a drama second to none in significance and interest. To understand this drama is to acquire a deeper, wiser love for youth. To sketch it in outline, setting forth the normal sequence of spiritual experiences through which the youth is conducted in the course of his development, is the object of this chapter.

In the transformation of the child into the man, there are three great things to be done. We observe, accordingly, three acts in the drama of youth. They correspond also in a general way with the three periods of adolescence. The dramatic action of the first period centers in the youth's achievement of his personal freedom ; in the second, in his discovery of life ; in the third, in his incorporation, as a distinct individual,

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into the social body. The first step to a sympathetic understanding of youth is an intelligent acquaintance with the necessary, dramatic action within the spirit by which these successive objects are attained.

How, then, does the soul achieve its freedom ? How does the child set out to become a man ?

The child is born into a ready-made world, and spends his childhood in becoming familiar with it. By it he is sustained, protected, instructed. To it he conforms, in most instances willingly, in exceptional ones under stress of discipline. But before the child can be a man, he must work this ready-made world over into the terms of his personal life ; for every man must, in a sense, build his own world. When therefore the child becomes a youth he casts off the world that he has known, like so many pieces of clothing outgrown. He begins to build his own world. He begins to act on his own initiative, rather than at the command of others. He feels new powers at work within him, preparing him to be independent of support and control. As he becomes too large in body to be governed by corporal punishment, and strong enough to be effective at manual labor or manly sports, his mind also refuses control from without and displays a new efficiency in independent work. He can think more surely, see more deeply, comprehend more widely ; and * withal he is conscious of a new constructive power to form and execute his own designs. All this unsettles his relation to his world ; the physical uneasiness of the period is matched by mental and spiritual unrest.

The ready-made world of custom, rule and convention is now required to justify itself to the mind of the youth ; and if it be not founded on the everlasting rocks, he will find it out, and go delving for a better foundation. In order to make a man of him, nature draws him apart, bids him examine and make sure of his foundations, sets him over against his entire environment, and makes hmi doubt and question and criticize that world in which he finds himself. As a child, he was in and of that world ; now he comes to regard himself as apart from it. He no longer relies on it for

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support or defense. He often feels himself alone, with battles to fight in which assistance from without is impossible ; yet even so feels proudly conscious that he is strong enough to fight and win. A spirit of selfsufficiency is awake within him. The wisdom of his parents is no longer wise enough for him, and the truth of his teachers no longer true enough for him, and the God of his church no longer great enough for him. The new life that animates him requires him to stand apart from it all as a separate individual. Habits, thoughts, places, activities, and even persons that have been his delight now lose their attractions for him. In a word, the soul of the youth is alienated from its world.

It is by such alienation that the sou] achieves its freedom. The child setting out to become a man must be expected to find himself in frequent opposition to his childhood's world of ideas, habits and purposes, to cease to be confiding and submissively obedient, and to seek his law within. Such an alienation of spirit, much more pronounced in some cases than in others, is a

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normal characteristic of youth. One investigator found that ninety per cent of the young people whom he studied loved solitude. The reason is apparent : estrangement is the price the soul must pay for individuality. Before the soul is fitted for the activities of a man's life, it must needs retire upon itself, separate itself from the world, from customs and regulations that have been familiar, get its own point of view, and estimate the worth of things for itself. It is in seclusion that the soul comes to know its own freedom, works its ideas and convictions into a harmony, forms its great life purposes, and becomes really able to stand alone before the world. Like the Prodigal Son, the soul must gather all its own together and withdraw to a far country ; but it is not prodigals only that do so ; before entering upon life's work, Moses and Elijah, Christ and Paul, went alone into the wilderness.

The second act in the drama of youth is the discovery of life. Going forth master of himself and of his own affairs, the youth makes trial of life on his own responsibility. He " sees life " ; he discovers what life is ; and his first discovery is tragic.

The tragedy of human life is this: that while none can be a man until his soul has achieved its freedom, yet none is wise enough to make faultless use of freedom when secured. Man is no sooner free than he becomes a sinner. Since the world began, says one, there has never been a child but was told that if he played with the fire he would be burned; and since the world began there has never been a child but has played with the fire and been burned. Among the experiences that are universal and seem to be necessary for the realization of our human estate, that of being burned with fire and that of being singed with sin must be reckoned.

We have seen that the soul comes to know its own liberty by setting itself over against all else, questioning the conventional order of the ready-made world in which it finds itself, and seeking its own foundations on which to build the structure of its own life. Such an alienation is a necessarj^ step

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on the road to individual completeness ; it is the true self-assertion, in which the soul definitely proposes to itself to go about its essential business of ordering its own life. But new discoveries are commonly exaggerated ; they fill the field of vision and exclude all else from sight. When the soul of youth comes to feel its duty to be an individual self, it is almost certain to overestimate the amount of self-assertion needful. The necessary assertion of self in contrast with the external world, by an easy and natural exaggeration, passes over into an obstinate refusal to learn from others or be guided by their experience, or leads to an unwillingness to recognize the validity of any standard of obligation outside one's self. This is self-will, the enthronement of youth's poor, inexperienced self, as the only authority, the monarch of his world. And herein is sin.

The classical picture of the exaggerated self-will of youth is, of course, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Its present interest for us lies in its lively depicting of the consequences of extravagant self-will

Kioting in the excesses of new-found freedom, the Prodigal doubtless believed that he was seeing life : and so he was — one part of it. In the days of swine-feeding and starvation he saw the rest. And then he saw the whole at once. And this is the discovery that youth is to make, that life is a whole, all its parts bound inseparably together ; that every deed shall have its effect on the doer, every act shall be registered indelibly upon the soul of him that does it, there to bear its eternal witness to what he has been and is. No warning or counsel, nothing but experience, will teach this lesson to most young men. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," is an authentic statement of Holy Writ ; but no youth really believes it until he begins to reap some harvest from his own sowing. Hosts of youth, going forth to see life for themselves, do not understand that the fruit of extravagance is want, that indulgence leads to weakness, that to squander money or strength or character must bring one, by a law as changeless as the course of the sun, to poverty of resources, or power, or morals.

It often takes an experience nothing short of tragic to make a young man understand that life is one, that act and consequence can by no means be dissevered, and a man's deeds are his destiny. This experience of law is the discovery of life ; and the youth who has learned to comprehend life's unity, and include both deed and consequence, beginning and end, in one view, can henceforth " see life steadily and see it whole."

The spiritual experience of youth in the physical period of adolescence is that of individuation, the setting apart of the self from the previous environment ; in the second or mental period, it is characteristically that of illumination, the discovery of the meaning and value of activities that one has chosen for himself. This illumination brings many keen disappointments. There is much of humiliation and self-reproach in it ; much also of wholesome truth and saving self -discovery. When a youth makes, all for himself, his first great failure, he begins to understand himself and the world. When a course of action that he deliberately selected leads to evil and disaster, he gains a practical insight into the construction of the moral world and into his own moral nature as well. It is good for youth to learn, as early as possible, its own weaknesses and limitations. We expect the young men of every generation to renew unceasingly the quest of the hitherto unattainable ; but that quest is more likely to receive a substantial reward if it abjures at the outset the absurdly impossible; young men should not expect to mingle fire and water, or to hasten God's kingdom by leaving the paths of rectitude.

Nevertheless, the illumination of youth is not all disillusion. Even the fallen Prodigal was no pessimist. His self -disco very revealed not only his weakness and demerit, but his real worth as well : he was made for something better than a swineherd. In the orientation of the spirit, youth finds errors to be corrected and perversities to be overcome ; but many of its hypotheses are confirmed, many expectations fulfilled, many ideals realized. This is the time when the main outlines of knowledge and conviction are finally established. It is the period of college life for those who go to college, of learning a trade or business, or trying several, for those who do not. For all it is a time of venture and experiment, and normal youth is shrewd to heed its lessons. And it issues, with nearly all, in a well-formed notion of what one means to be and do in life, and an established set of ideas and principles by whose light he expects to do life's work. Just as early adolescence shows what manner of physique a man is to have, so this middle period determines and reveals the mental outfit with which he is to go through the world.