Great Utterances on Helping Humanity by Helping Childhood and Youth

Dr. C. W. Saleeby: Only the race that regards its young, renews its youth.

Bishop Phillips Brooks: He who helps a child helps humanity with a distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help, given to human creatures in any other stage of their human life, can possibly give again.

Mrs. Sarah K. Bolton:

He built a house; time laid it in the dust;
He wrote a book; its title's now forgot;
He ruled a city, but his name is not
On any tablet graven, or where rust
Can gather from disuse, or marble bust.

He took a child from out a wretched cot,
Who on the State dishonor might have brought,
And reared him to the Christian's hope and trust:
The boy, to manhood grown, became a light
To many souls, and preached for human need
The wondrous love of the Omnipotent.
The work has multiplied like stars at night
When darkness deepens; every noble deed
Lasts longer than a granite monument.

INTRODUCTION

The author of this book has been from his school days a leader in all that makes for gladness. He bears in his body the marks of his good times on first base in college days, and was at that time also the secretary of an amateur boxing club. He entered into college gymnastics not less but more than usual, and in consequence gained in freshman year ten inches in height and twenty-seven pounds in weight. Surely, such a man should not be suspected of opposing clean sports and real ré-creations.

For twenty-one years he was a happy pastor of large churches, and for a third of a century has been widely known as a "cheerful reformer." He stresses the true meaning of the word "reformer," which signifies the restorer of normalcy, as when a doctor resets dislocated bones. Such restoration of the body politic means, of course, ultimate increase of happiness.

As this book deals more with children than Dr. Crafts' usual reform efforts, it is appropriate to recall that he and Mrs. Crafts (who has contributed important chapters and advisory work), have been for more than a half century specializing in teaching Sunday school children. and their teachers-also speaking often in public schools and colleges. Mrs. Crafts was in 1870-1872 the one woman in the group that founded the modern uniform lesson system. The men were D. L. Moody, B. F. Jacobs, J. H. Vincent, and Edward Eggleston. She was the

teacher of Mr. Moody's Sunday school teachers, and of three hundred poor children in his primary class, and at the same time taught a larger number of well-to-do children in Mr. Jacob's Sunday school, and also wrote the primary Sunday school lessons in the National Teacher. It was about a year later, when Dr. Eggleston was holding Sunday school conventions in the East, that Dr. Crafts began work with him as a Sunday school convention speaker. Soon after he spoke for Dr. J. H. Vincent (afterwards Bishop) at the annual meeting of the National Methodist Sunday School Union in Arch Street Church, Philadelphia, since which he has written or spoken almost every week for young people or their teachers. Dr. and Mrs. Crafts were for fourteen years and a half the joint teachers of the "Christian Herald Million Bible Class." They had previously written lessons and articles for the Sunday School Times and many other Sunday school periodicals. Mrs. Crafts for nine years. taught the weekly lesson to primary Sunday school teachers of New York and vicinity every Saturday in Broadway Tabernacle. At Chatauquas in Madison, Wisconsin; Monteagle, Tennessee, and Lexington, Kentucky, she taught children, in the first case for eleven years, in the second for seven years, and in the third for three years, not only Bible lessons but the history of great paintings. great hymns, great cathedrals, great events of the nineteenth century, and juvenile sociology. Both Dr. and Mrs. Crafts in their travels have spoken often at colleges, but Dr. Crafts' favorite re-creation in his wide lecture tours has been speaking three or four times a week to high schools on "The Essentials of Manliness and Womanliness," which is called back in many cases so soon as there is a new set of pupils. Dr. and Mrs. Crafts have written numerous books for children and their teachers,

the first being "Through the Eye to the Heart." The second was "Childhood, the Text Book of the Age."

The writer of this introduction is indebted to another book of Dr. Crafts, "Practical Christian Sociology," which he heard as a student when originally delivered as lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Professor W. Henry Green, in a letter expressing for the faculty appreciation of the lectures, said: "The practical acquaintance which you manifested with the numerous and complicated questions arising under this theme surprised and delighted me. The wise reserve shown in avoiding hasty an inconsider

ate judgments

matters

upon

that require fur

ther invesiga

tion, and the im

(From Princeton Seminary Lectures)

partial attitude taken in regard to matters which have led to serious strife and agitation, cannot be too highly commended. There is but one feeling among us, that of high gratification that we have been permitted to hear these instructive and valuable lectures."

This book is intended to present social problems more familiarly, in a form suitable for personal reading of old and young as well as for collegiate study.

ROBERT WATSON.

MR. ROBERT E. SPEER, President of the Federal Council of Churches, in "Report on India and Persia," published Nov. 3, 1922, p. 619:

Where else than in the completion of the Christian Empire is the hope of the world to be found? And how is its completion to be achieved? By many forces wielded by the purpose of God— good government and honorable trade and true education, care for human health, the production and conservation and just distribution of wealth, man's fuller knowledge of himself, and of his brothers and of the world. The Mission enterprise does not speak slightingly of these or of any of the unnumbered ways in which God is advancing his purpose of righteousness and unity upon the earth. But it believes it is doing His work in the most central and fundamental way of all-by "preaching Christ in the crucified style." He is the one Hope of the world.

Dr. Speer's report, of world significance far beyond what the title suggests, came to me, in response to request for some word on world conditions, on Nov. 3, 1922, just in time to get its final paragraph among the forewords of this book.