Boys and Religion.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume XV, Issue 7, 1 January 1925, Page 283

Boys and Religion.

In a valuable paper read before the Oxford Church Congress m October the Rev. C. S. Gillett, (Fellow and Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge), complains of the vagueness! of the religious education of boys m secondary schools: — Boys who would pass quite creditably m an examination m history or 'cHemistry or mathematics would get almost no marks for an elementary paper upon the outlines of the Christian Faith. Any intelligent or coherent defence of that Faith would be entirely and hopelessly beyond their capacity. Indeed, to many of them, the Faith itself is nothing but a more or less tiresome code of morals tacked on to a dramatic piece of history—the history of a Jewish peasant who lived a very beautiful life, whom secretly they reverence profoundly, and who died a long time ago. They believe m God, as a mysterious Force or Fate, Who is "personal," perhaps, but a very long way off; and it is therefore not surprising that three-fifths of them are saying nothing but a few 1 very perfunctory prayers learnt m early childhood, or have given up saying any prayers at all, by the time they are twenty-one. A considerable portion of them keep pretty straight morally, but their moral code has no obviously essential connexion with their religion, and if they slip into . evil courses, they have no practical knowledge of any definite means provided

by it tot helping them to get out again. Religion m general they think of as beinJE* mainly an individual matter of private emotions, which comes easily to a small clique of pious persons with whom they are anxious not to be officially or very closely connected, and which, m any case, is entirely dissociated from "their intellectual interests, their social or political or athletic enthusiasms— in short, from all the business and, still more, from all the leisure and laughter of their normal lives. Thafc Christianity is m any sense a corporate thing: that it involves any corporate effort or corporate loyalty simply never occurs to them. He laments that neglect to teach boys dogmatic truths and • the reasons for definite faith leaves them at the mercy of the first piece of sceptical propaganda they happen to pick up. Boys leave school without any religious convictions because they have become accustomed to regard religion as a merely sentimental thing. Morality based on sentiment has a very insecure foundation. Morality must be based upon a living faith m a living and ever-present Christ. "A man must believe that He who took human flesh is God Himself; he must believe m the mission of the Holy Ghost, and the immeasurable power of prayer and the Divine Grace of the Sacraments, if he is to try with any sureness of hope and courage to live by the Christian Standard 1 himself, or ot commend it to the hearts and minds of other people. "I do assure you that one of the tragedies of undergraduate life is simply that, when a boy falls (perhaps for the first time) into serious sin, he so often does not know how to get right again. "He dare not talk to anybody— he can hardly name the name of God without getting hot all over. His own broodings, his own temporary remorse, even his own quite genuine moVement of penitence, have failed to give him the courage and confidence which he needs, and often enough he simply slides miserably downhill. And meanwhile', he has probably gathered no idea at all about Sacramental Confession and Absolution, except that it is a Roman Catholic practice which is somehow a little disreputable! I cannot believe that thew3 is any kind of Churchman who does not think that to be a tragedy. There is just the same kind of misconception about Holy Communion. Tliese young men think that Communion is a luxury or a reward for a very few pious people called saints; they have no conception of it as a help for themselves and- all the other people called "sinners." They begin very soon to think that the help God gives us is to be measured solely by our sense of devotion m asking for it,

or our sense of assurance that it has been bestowed. That is quite fatal. They have never realised the Sacraments as covenanted means of grace which are tangible and permanent and universal, utterly independent of their own transient and fluctuating emotions: means by which (if they come to them with humility and sincerity) the dullest and most ordinary of wayfarers, the slackers, the shirkers, the miserable waverers and weaklings, can yet receive the Life of God into their own lives and m that strength make their weakness perfect. Once the fuller and broader conception of the Church and the Sacraments became familiar to our schoolboys, it would change a hundred things. It would change the whole temper of their thought about that unknown world — the huge mass of men and women who labor and suffer all round them. Social enthusiasm and social service would no longer be the hobby of a few sentimental eccentrics, but a plain duty— a plain consequence of their faith m the Incarnation and their membership m the great Brotherhood of Christendom. It would teach them something of the meaning of corporate devotion, and of th© central act of Christian worship m the Eucharist. It would alter all their thought about the saints (at present they think that every saint was either a monk or a milksop, or both), about the unseen world, about death and all the faithful dead. For they would learn to feel quite vividly that when they are praying they are one of a great company of prayingpeople — some here, some m other countries, some on the other side of death, but all one — all living members of the eternal Church. They would see suddenly why they ought to be praying for Christian missions (at present the very sound of the ■words fills them with a kind of exasperated boredom), why they ought to be praying for the reunion of Christendom, why they ought to be praying for one another. They would see their own Christian life as a difficult but entrancing quest; they would see all Christian service as the loyalty of a great pursuit. Indeed, prayer and the whole process of spiritual advance would no longer seem to them to be selfish or mechanical or meaningless—no longer a pious hobby or a sentimental luxury for the spiritually elite, but an adventure shared with noble comrades of every age and kind— the glorious adventure of making friends with God."