to understand him and our blundering with him. But there is no excuse for mistakes now. We know that with proper training the boy should approach the religious crises of his soul and life as a part of the Father's plan for him and should understand just what he is and what his father's attitude toward him is and what he expects him to be and what he desires to do for him as he realizes his own helplessness. The loud cry "What shall I do to be saved?" from a boy of twelve years of age expressing agony and ignorance, is not something to rejoice in but to deplore, for it reveals that we have largely failed to make plain to that boy what his condition implied and what he should do because of it. He may come to his moral and religious crises with a consciousness of moral defects and sorrow for sin but he ought to know that Jesus has revealed the Father who is ready to forgive and help the moment he turns away from wrong and to him. The consciousness of the Father should be so strong that the boy would instinctively find his heart. Woe be to the evangelist or pastor or Christian worker with the young, who gives these children erroneous conceptions of the Father, who fails rightly to interpret their tendencies and problems to them, who misjudges and falsely condemns them, who doubts their inherent capacity for God and good, who fails to make clear to them the genius of Jesus' simple and beautiful religion, who places before them unreasonable alternatives, who fogs their soul vision with definitions and dogmas, and who does anything with them but to lead them onward and upward to the Christian manhood and womanhood which the Master came to give them. All honor to the increasing number of noble and intelligent men and women leaders in religious education who are understanding the child and are making religion seem normal to the rollicking boy and girl and leading them through the crises of their lives with divine foresight and tact. WE CHAPTER EIGHT THE CHRISTIAN MOTIVES ́E have long been accustomed to appreciate the value of motive in estimating religious character. St. Thomas à Kempis once said, "God weighs the motive of one's action rather than the amount of performance." There is truth in the statement that a man is very largely what he tries to be. The Christian career is one which is tested by its motives. A Christian is not a Christian unless his motives are what they should be. The life of respectability must be punctured by the query concerning the motive, to ascertain its real value. The life also of devotion to an apparently high idealism and even that of Christian activity must be judged the same way. This is because motives are from the heart and the heart tests the real man. The questions as to why we do what we do and why we are what we are, call up the purposes of the inmost nature and reveal what we are. We have become so accustomed to this reasoning that it is almost trite. Yet perhaps its full implication needs emphasis. If the test of religion is after all in the motives of the heart as manifested in the life, if our entire life careers are to be judged at the last day by the single word "why," if our purposes are our real characters, then it behooves each person to be sure that his purposes are true to the spirit of Christ. But more than this, this same test should be applied to each person in the initial step of becoming a Christian. There are un-Christian motives for accepting the faith, idealism and activities of a Christian life. At the very beginning, one should respond to the higher purposes and nobler reasoning and move toward Christ and his expectations of him, with pure motives in his soul. If he does not, how can he even begin the Christian life aright? Without such motives, how can he grow into that Christlikeness of character which is indispensable to a Christian life. The genius of the start largely determines the nature of one's Christian character and the direction and power of his life. The originating impulse should be essentially Christlike to be Christian. It should be of the same sort as the after life must be, to be truly Christlike. The early Christians gave no evidence of being entirely free from the lesser motives in their religious lives. The truth is that the Church Fathers did not possess that purity of moral motive that the Greek philosophers manifested. The scholars make it very plain to us that there is a great contrast between the motives of the Christian thinkers of the early centuries and the ancients of Greece. The one thought which controlled the minds of the Christians, was the blessedness of happiness hereafter which they might secure and therefore their motive in foregoing pleasure or indulgence in any sensuous or temporary gratification on earth, was to gain this eternal joy in the future life. The Greek thinkers with one accord attributed an intrinsic beauty to goodness and elevated the joy of participation in this beauty into the highest impulse for conduct, but the great majority of the church Fathers, particularly the Latin Fathers, insisted strenuously upon an ample reward for virtue. The evidence is that these Fathers regarded virtue simply as a means to blessedness, a highly wrought out and fanciful happiness which they were to experience in the life beyond the grave. And their contemplation of this led them to become rather indifferent to the value of a moral life here and surely gave them no joy in it. Some scholars declare that the early Christians did not hesitate to consider it actual folly to suffer the pains which the life of virtue might involve if there was no sure promise of reward for that virtue in the future life. Lactantius wrote, "If there were no immortality, it would be wise to do evil and foolish to do good." There are few Christian leaders today who would countenance such a statement as at all compatible with true Christian ideals or motives. We are leagues in advance of such conceptions of Christian character. Yet we fear that there are traces of such ideas to be found today and they are logically accompanied by false motives. It will be interesting for us to consider the generally accepted motives for becoming Christians which are in vogue quite universally. We may find that while we profess to be so advanced in our character, we still fall below what Jesus would have us realize. An examination of the reasons which led us to accept Christ and follow him, or those which we know moved others to do the same, or the appeals we and others known to us have made to secure confessions of faith in Christ and from those not professedly Christian, will reveal no doubt some motives altogether unchristian in spirit and others, while |