their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morality in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the race.' His opinions on this subject were afterwards modified, and, as most would think, happily modified by experience. He encouraged even the younger boys to become communicants, and was never more gratified than when there were a large number of them."

In every aspect of life we see the child gaining recognition-the church bringing up the rear. We see prevention in the child rated above the cure of the adult; we see formation put above reformation. We see this not only in our educational treatises and text-books, but in schoolhouses; we see it in surgery; in the examination of the eyes, ears and nerves of school children; in juvenile courts; in play-grounds; in literature for children; in the abandonment of the congregate system for orphans, defectives, delinquents, and the friendless; in the free kindergartens; in nature study and manual training; in foreign mission schools for children; in the raising of the age of child labor and the war on child slavery; in the organizations for protecting children from cruelty; in such institutions as the George Junior Republic; in mothers' congresses and round tables; in the rise of normal schools; in tenement house improvement legislation; in the abandonment or reduction of corporal punishment; in scientific child study.

In the church we see this progression-somewhat timid it is true, and apprehensive that orthodoxy may suffer by it-in the primary Sunday-school; in the normal classes; in the disposition to accept Bushnell's doctrine that "the child is to grow up a Christian and never know himself as being otherwise;" in the Christian Endeavor and kindred movements. Quite startlingly Trumbull tells us, "Children's singing might almost be called an invention of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was practically unknown before, with all its blessings to and through children. It went from America to Europe and the far East, after its value was learned here; and it has girdled the globe since then. A prominent friend of missions, who first visited Turkey and Palestine, nearly fifty years ago, and then again twenty years later, says that on his first tour he never heard child's voice in song outside of Christendom. He heard native children, but he

mothers sing lullabies to their heard no singing by children. On his second visit, children's voices were heard at almost every point, in our children's hymns and tunes, and he then thanked God that so many children were thus thanking God."

Trumbull continues: "Under the old dispensation the man had the first place. Under the new dispensation the position of the child and of the childlike was first at the start, and ever onward. In the prophet's promise of yet better things to come in Messiah's completed reign the

child is to be still

child when a hundred years

old, and he who is a hundred years old without being a child shall only be accursed. We have evidently been moving in that direction.

"Jesus Christ not only gave children a place in His kingdom, He gave them the chief place. He did not say that if a child grew up to manhood, having kept on improving, he might come to understand God's truth; He did say that the only way in which a mature man could understand this truth was in getting back to his child way of thinking. That this was not a mere figure of speech is shown by His having a real flesh and blood child before Him when He said it. This has been a hard saying for apostles and theologians, and preachers generally, to realize the truth of; but they have been making a good start the past century. There is hope of themthe most childlike."

But the movement in that direction has been slow and, on the whole, grudgingly given. The church waited for the world to take the lead in it and now, as a natural consequence, in some quarters, we find the church complaining of its want of growth. Even in those aspects of its progression towards the educational ideal of its Founder, it is continually deceiving itself by a timid patching of the old garment instead of ordering a new suit.

A recent medical writer says that some germicides-formaldehyde for instance-used in the nasal passages destroy the tissues along with the

germs. Medicines that seem to cure, kill. This is a thwart, a boomerang.

Self-thwarting is common to us all as individuals and as society. The nation thwarts itself in that it creates some evils which it is at the same time endeavoring to cure. We produce criminals in our effort to reform them. We make paupers in our effort to prevent pauperism. We increase the difficulty of preserving peace by the display of the paraphernalia of war. Dr. A. F. Chamberlain' searchingly shows that "while we are busy rescuing the individual child from the clutches of the adult, primitive peoples, who may be said to represent the childhood of the race, are being treated as once he was. We ought to be as fair to the 'naughty race abroad as we are to the 'naughty boy' at home. If we are abandoning the old unscientific methods of treating the one we ought not to make them the basis of our dealings with the other.. 'War as a civilizer' is still blest by the priest to whom the flag so often means so much more than the cross."

.

We cannot begin to estimate the loss to our missionary efforts through the counteracting effects of war. The brutalities of soldiers representing Christian nations in China during the Boxer troubles are an incalculable thwart. And yet the church takes little note of the world's spiritual loss through war. On this point Mr.

The Pedagogical Seminary, Dec., 1902.

Ernest H. Crosby asks, "What possible truce" there can be between the hell of war and the church or the kingdom of heaven. It is a fact, he says, that the church favors war; and the only audience he ever had unanimously favoring war was an audience of ministers!

In a Christmas sermon a few years ago, however, Dr. C. H. Parkhurst in his direct, unevasive way, spoke of the commercial and other civilizing consequences of war-as claimed by those who ought to know more about such things than heand added:

'But when all those matters are put one side and we come on to ground that is distinctly my province as a representative of Jesus Christ, then I do not yield to you; and I am going to say to you, without any 'buts' or 'wheresoevers,' that to promote civilization by the use of swords and artillery is false to the word, example and life of Jesus Christ and of all His apostles, and alien to the entire genius of Christianity. If you say to that that there are places in the world where Christianity has sprung up as an aftergrowth of military conquest, undoubtedly: but that does not alter anything so far as relates to the point I have just made. It does not relieve filthy soil that flowers grow out of it. God is all the time doing that thing. It was indispensable to our Lord's mission that Judas should betray Him, but that didn't help Judas any.

"Or you may claim that the powder and shot method of extending civilization is more feasible,