We cannot allow so many young lives to run to waste as in the past. The taxpayer, as Sir Robert Baden Powell puts it, is paying 20s. on schools for making the children efficient citizens, and he is paying 30s. on prisons and police for rectifying their failure to respond to the training!

What is our anchor of hope? It is surely the organisations which exist to help the youth of our big cities—the Y.M.C.A., the Boys' Brigades, Church Lads' Brigade, school influence, parental influence, and very specially the Boy Scout and Girl Guide and Boy and Girl Club movement.

The first thing we have to do is to get the right mission spirit into all these organisations. The boys and girls must be got hold of by one another. I quote a letter from Sir Robert Baden Powell to The Times:

"It may interest your readers to know that among other steps suggested for checking the increase of juvenile crime, the principal authorities of one great centre called in the help of the Boy Scouts a few months ago. As a result, a system has been established whereby each scout takes at least one street boy under his charge and brings him in as an honorary member to use the Scouts' Clubs, and to play in their games and practise their hobbies, thereby gaining improved environment and activities. We find that the worst hooligan soon makes the best scout; he only needs direction for his adventurous energy and attractive pursuits to fill a void. So soon as he proves his worth he is given an armlet to wear as a 'temporary scout.' This scheme is not used as a means for recruiting members to the movement, for with our present depleted staff of scoutmasters we have not room for them, but it meets the wish on the part of the scouts themselves to render service, and we hope that with its extension to other centres it will have visible effect, not only in decreasing the present crime in the streets, but in increasing future efficient citizenship for the State."

Our appeal must be to those who are entrusted with the difficult task of inspiring our youth with nobler ideals of citizenship and a higher esprit de corps. Have we in the past done all we could to quicken and call out the sense of love of the school and shame to dishonour it, that is certainly part of the character-forming that goes on in our public schools? Have we given the præfect system, spoken of just now, a chance in our elementary schools?—a system which, it is true, puts responsibility for keeping order and enforcing discipline on young shoulders, but thereby calls out esprit de de corps and powers of self-control and government.

Have we encouraged the closer link between the home and the school which is essential to the understanding of the character of the children, and have we helped the home to help the school by urging the need of home discipline?-for it is in that bedrock of home-life that a healthy and wisely disciplined childhood can alone grow up to the glory of God and in favour with God and man. If only religion could once more be brought into the homes of the people, and if the responsibility of fatherhood and motherhood could once again be realised, we should find that one of the greatest causes of juvenile crime would pass away.

But our appeal must also be to local authorities. They can, if they will, prevent the scandal of our public hoardings by obliging all posters to be sent to the chief constable a week before publication. They can urge that the police keep vigilant watch on the shops that deal with objectionable post cards; and with regard to the kinema shows, the local authority has no excuse for tolerating the down-grade film or the downgrade poster advertisement.

Last November the Home Office sent round to local authorities for the use of the licensing magistrates a notice of the proposed official censorship of films, which they hoped would become law in the early part of this year, and they included with it a draft of model conditions for insertion meanwhile in future kinematograph licences, and the justices were told that these clauses might with advantage be inserted in any licence granted before the Government censorship was an established thing.

In Birmingham the increase of juvenile crime was remarkable. In 1915, 1646 children more than in the previous year were brought before the court, and in 1916 this number was greatly exceeded. The Birmingham magistrates therefore determined last November to take the suggestion of the Home Office, and they inserted at the Licensing Sessions the three following model clauses as a condition of the licence being granted:

"1. No film shall be shown which is likely to be injurious to morality, or to encourage or incite to crime, or to lead to disorder, or to be in any way offensive in the circumstances to public feeling, or which contains any offensive representation of living persons. If the licensing authority serve a notice on the licensee that they object to the exhibition of any films on any of the grounds aforesaid, that film shall not be shown.

"2. No poster, advertisement, sketch, synopsis or programme of a film shall be displayed, sold or supplied, either inside

or outside the premises, which is likely to be injurious to morality, or to encourage or incite to crime, or to lead to disorder, or to be in any way offensive in the circumstances to public feeling, or which contains any offensive representation of living persons.

"3. Every part of the premises to which the public are admitted shall be so lighted during the whole of the time it is open to the public as to make it possible to see clearly over the whole area."

Other local authorities have done the like, and there is no reason why these conditions for the granting of licences to kinema shows should not become general. The mere fact that the Government has withdrawn its contemplated film censorship has cast a very heavy responsibility on the licensing bench.

As things are now there is no official specially told off to visit the kinema shows in a given area, with power to protest to the manager and to report to the magistrates. A film which appears objectionable in one area is allowed to go free in another, and the suggestion has been made that the chief constables should black-list objectionable films or posters which are withdrawn, and allow the chief constables of other towns to know what films or posters are so black-listed.

H. D. RAWNSLEY.

THE PULPIT AND ITS OPPORTUNITIES.

A LAYMAN'S VIEW.

F. H. CUTCLIFFE.

THE National Mission of Repentance and Hope-giving evidence, as it does, of the genuine concern of the Church at its own past failures and a determination to regain its influence over the consciences of men-seems to invite a candid and friendly statement of opinion from any who unwillingly find themselves, to whatever extent, aloof from the churches of their fathers, and perhaps of their own earlier days.

Worship of some kind is the almost indispensable need of all who are striving to live up to the highest moral and spiritual ideals of which they are conscious: does the Pulpit aid the satisfaction of that need as it should, or as befits its influential position in the Churches? In pursuing this inquiry we will leave out of consideration the pulpits occupied by men who preach because they happen to have been brought up to the preaching profession, and those occupied by men whose chief ambition is to shine as orators; we are concerned only with the preachers who sincerely believe they are commissioned with a Divine message which the world needs a message designed to save men from sin and its consequences.

The preacher's mission is to proclaim a Gospel of salvation from sin, but when we listen to the individual message as it is delivered, we become aware of a confusion of tongues-amid whose clamour great collective spiritual achievements become as impossible as did the rearing of the tower of Babel to its crowd of polyglot builders.

The Evangelical dogmatically declares that what is amiss with men is their bondage to the world, the flesh, and the devil. But who can draw a dividing line between the Church and the world, the wheat and the tares? In spite of Christ's warning, our Puritan fathers essayed to do it, with consequences disastrous both to the Church and the world, and to-day we

realise that though the dividing line exists, it is as invisible as the Equator. We know also that the flesh may prevail in the cell and be mastered in the camp. As for a personal devil, what evidence of his existence is admitted by our general attitude towards human problems? It is not that men have ceased to be enslaved by those enemies of the soul designated in the Puritan category, but only in grosser cases have we clear proof of the slavery, and to direct our attention towards the sins of individuals is a futility which only leads to Pharisaism. The motor car or picture palace or cigar (as Spurgeon reminded us) may be a means of grace to one man and a curse to another; they may even fill both rôles to the same man at different times and under different circumstances.

The Sacerdotalists have discarded impossible Puritanical tests only to impose those of sacrament or creed: observance or neglect of the sacraments, obedience to the authoritative pronouncements of the Church, a public profession of faith, even attendance at public worship, are held to be the outward signs (or means) of inward and spiritual grace. How has the war treated such tests? Is there a dogmatist who would deny sacramental grace to the tens of thousands who, while indifferent to the sacraments and services of the Church, have not declined the supreme sacrifice of life itself for a cause which they believed to be righteous? Dares anyone preach a Gehenna for our dead heroes?

Which proves (what has been increasingly evident for a long time) that the Pulpit has lost its once powerful terrorising dynamic; for the average "irreligious" man does not hesitate to dare destiny in multitudinous good company.

Not only so, but with the ability to terrify has been lost the power to attract. to attract. So long we have been familiarised with the idea of one sacred book (in the popular mind the Bible is emphatically a book and not a literature), one holy day in seven, one chosen people, one type of heaven, one special sequence of revelation, that the grandeur of the book, the real privilege of the day, the significance of the Hebrew character in history, the charm of the heaven, the sublimity of unfolding revelation have eluded our mental grasp. have been elevated above our common life as the Sphinx above the desert sand, and often there is as little organic connection in the one case as in the other-as little flow of sympathy as there is between the high and dry pulpit and the vacant pew.

They

Meanwhile what sources of inspiration of noble living are left unexplored? Comparative religion might as well be non