Wilson 
 Young People and the Church 

 
 
 WOODROV*/ WILSON
 
 rv« 
 
 By WOODROW WILSON 
 
 An address delivered before the Fortieth 
 Annual Convention of the Pennsylvania 
 State Sabbath School Association, at 
 Pittsburg, October 13, 1904. 
 
 Philadelphia, Pa. 
 THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES COMPANY
 
 Copyright, 1904. by 
 
 The Sunday School Times Company 
 
 Philadelphia, Pa.
 
 BV 
 
 WE BEAR a relationship to the rising 
 generation whether we will or 
 not. It is one of the principal 
 tasks of each generation of mature persons 
 in this world to hand on the work of the 
 world to the next generation. We are 
 engaged even more than we are aware in 
 molding young people to be like ourselves. 
 Those who have read that delightful book of 
 Kenneth Graham's entitled "The Golden 
 Age," the age of childhood, will recall the 
 indictment which he brings against the 
 Olympians, as he calls them, — the grown-up 
 people, — who do not understand the feelings 
 of little folks not only, but do not seem to 
 understand anything very clearly; who do 
 not seem to live in the same world, who are 
 constantly forcing upon the young ones 
 standards and notions which they cannot 
 understand, which they instinctively reject. 
 They live in a world of delightful imagina- 
 tion; they pursue persons and objects that 
 never existed; they make an Argosy laden 
 with gold out of a floating butterfly, — and 
 these stupid Olympians try to translate 
 these things into uninteresting facts. 
 
 726464
 
 I suppose that nothing is more painful 
 in the recollections of some of us than the 
 efforts that were made to make us like 
 grown-up people. The delightful follies that 
 we had to eschew, the delicious nonsense 
 that we had to disbelieve, the number of 
 odious prudences that we had to learn, the 
 knowledge that though the truth was less 
 interesting than fiction, it was more impor- 
 tant than fiction, — the fact that what people 
 told you could not always be relied on, and 
 that it must be tested by the most uninter- 
 esting tests. 
 
 When you think of it, we are engaged 
 in the somewhat questionable practise of 
 making all the world uniform. We should 
 be very sure that we are very handsome 
 characters to have a full heart in the under- 
 taking of making youngsters exactly like 
 ourselves. There is an amount of aggregate 
 vanity in the process which it is impossible 
 to estimate. Moreover, you will notice that 
 there are very whimsical standards in this 
 world. We speak of some persons as being 
 normal, and of others as being abnormal. 
 By normal we mean like ourselves; by 
 abnormal we mean unlike ourselves. The 
 abnormal persons are in the minority, and 
 therefore most of them are in the asylum. 
 If they got to be in the majority, we would 
 go to the asylum. If we departed from that
 
 law of the Medes and Persians which com- 
 mands us to be like other persons, we would 
 be in danger of the bars. The only thing 
 that saves us is that the abnormal people are 
 not all alike. If they were, they might be 
 shrewd enough to get the better of us, and 
 put us where we put them. 
 
 And we are engaged in rubbing off the 
 differences. We desire not to be supposed to 
 be unlike other persons ; we would prefer to 
 abjure our individuality, and to say, as Dean 
 Swift advised every man to say who desired 
 to be considered wise, "My dear sir, I am 
 exactly of your opinion." We try to avoid 
 collisions of individuality, and go about to 
 tell the younger people that they must do 
 things as we have always done them, and as 
 our parents made us do them, or else they 
 will lose caste in the world. 
 
 There are two means by which we carry 
 on this interesting work of making the next 
 generation like the last. There is life itself, 
 and that is the most drastic school there is. 
 There is no school so hard in its lessons as 
 the school of life. You are not excused from 
 any one of its exercises. You are not ex- 
 cused for mistakes in any one of its lessons. 
 We say a great many things that are harsh, 
 and deservedly harsh, I will admit, about 
 college hazing; but there is a more subtle 
 hazing than that. The world hazes the per-
 
 sons that will not conform. It hazes after a 
 manner that is worse than hazing their 
 bodies, — it hazes their spirits, and teases 
 them with the pointed finger and the curl of 
 the lip, and says, "That man thinks he 
 knows the whole thing." That, I say, is a 
 very much more refined torture than making 
 a man do a great many ridiculous things for 
 the purpose of realizing that he is ridicu- 
 lous, and so getting out of conceit with him- 
 self. I do not believe in hazing, but I do 
 believe that there are some things worse 
 than hazing. And I have suffered worse 
 things from my fellow-men since I got out 
 of college than I suffered while I was in 
 college. 
 
 Life is a terrible master to those who 
 cannot escape its more trying processes. 
 The little urchin in the slums of the city 
 knows more of the prudences of life when he 
 is five than most of us knew at five and 
 twenty. He knows just how hard a school 
 he lives in, and just how astute he must be 
 to win any of its prizes, to win even the 
 tolerance of the powers that conduct it, even 
 to live from day to day. He knows how many 
 cars of Juggernaut must be dodged on the 
 streets for the mere leave to live, and the 
 keenness of his senses, his shrewdness in a 
 bargain, is such as would predict him a man 
 successful in commerce, would mean that
 
 some day he was going to overreach his 
 fellow-man as now life seems to be over- 
 reaching him, and imposing upon him, and 
 snatching every coveted thing from his 
 grasp. The process of culture, the process 
 of civilization, and the processes that can 
 be bought by wealth, are largely processes 
 of exemption from the harder classes of 
 the school of life. Some young gentlemen 
 brought up in the lap of luxury seem to 
 have escaped all lessons, seem to know just 
 as little about the world as it is possible for 
 a person to live nineteen years and know. 
 I have sometimes thought that if we could 
 get a whole college of youngsters who had 
 spent their boyhood in the slums, where 
 they had to have wits in order to live, we 
 would make extraordinary progress in 
 scholarship; whereas, when in our discour- 
 aged moments, — I mean discouraged mo- 
 ments in our teaching, — we take some grim 
 comfort in saying, as a Yale friend of mine 
 said, that after teaching twenty years he 
 had come to the conclusion that the human 
 mind had infinite resources for resisting the 
 introduction of knowledge. But you cannot 
 resist the introduction of the knowledge 
 that life brings. Life brings it and unloads 
 it in your lap whether you want it or not. 
 The other means we have of indoctrinat- 
 ing the next generation and making the
 
 world uniform is organization. The indi- 
 vidual process is not enough, we think, the 
 process of working upon each other indi- 
 vidually so that a miscellaneous set of 
 influences prick each of us like so many 
 currents of electricity. We think we must 
 organize as a body to have a given, definite, 
 predetermined effect upon others. So we 
 take unfair advantage of a youngster in 
 organizing a whole school so that he cannot 
 escape having certain impressions made 
 upon him. We tax the public in order to 
 pay for the schools which will make it im- 
 possible for him to escape. And there are 
 various instrumentalities which are organic. 
 In the first place, there is the home; then 
 there is the school ; then there is the church ; 
 then there are all the political means, the 
 means which we call social in their char- 
 acter, by which to mold and control the 
 rising generation. All of these have their 
 part in controlling the youth of the country 
 and making them what we deem it neces- 
 sary that they should be. 
 
 What do we wish that they should be? 
 If forced to reason about it, we say they 
 ought to be what we have found by experi- 
 ence it is prudent and wise to be; and they 
 ought to be something more, — they ought 
 to go one stage beyond the stage we have 
 gone. But we cannot conduct them beyond
 
 the stage we have reached. We can only 
 point and say, "Here are the boundaries 
 which we have reached; beyond is an un- 
 discovered country; go out and discover it. 
 We can furnish you with a few probabili- 
 ties; we can supply you with a few tenden- 
 cies; we can say to you that we think that 
 wisdom points in this direction; but we 
 cannot go with you; we cannot guide you; 
 we must part with you at the opening of 
 the door, and bid you Godspeed. But we 
 want you to go on; we do not want you to 
 stop where we stopped." 
 
 What capital, after all, is it that we sup- 
 ply them with? I take it that knowledge is 
 a pretty poor commodity in itself and by 
 itself. A ship does not sail because of her 
 cargo. There is no propulsion in that. If 
 the captain did not know his port, if he did 
 not know his rules of navigation, if he did 
 not know the management of his engines, 
 or have somebody aboard who did, if he did 
 not know all the powers that will carry the 
 ship to the place where her cargo will have 
 additional value, the cargo would be nothing 
 to him. What is his purpose? His purpose 
 is that the cargo should be used. Used for 
 what? For the convenience or the enlight- 
 enment, whatever it may be, of the people 
 to whom he is carrying it. 
 
 And so with knov^^iedge. The knowledge
 
 you supply to the little fellow in the home is 
 not merely conveyed to him in order that 
 he may be full; the knowledge that is sup- 
 plied to him in school is not put in him as 
 if he were merely a little vessel to be filled 
 to the top. My father, who was a very plain- 
 spoken man, used to use a phrase which was 
 rough, but it expressed the meaning exactly. 
 He said, "My son, the mind is not a prolix 
 gut to be stuffed." That is not the object 
 of it. It is not a vessel made to contain 
 something ; it is a vessel made to transmute 
 something. The process of digestion is of 
 the essence, and the only part of the food 
 that is of any consequence is the part that 
 is turned into blood and fructifies the whole 
 frame. And so with knowledge. All the 
 wise saws and prudent maxims and pieces 
 of information that we supply to the genera- 
 tion coming on are of no consequence what- 
 ever in themselves unless they get into the 
 blood and are transmuted. 
 
 And how are you going to get these 
 things into the blood? You know that 
 nothing communicates fire except fire. In 
 order to start a fire you must originate a 
 fire. You must have a little spark in order 
 to have a great blaze. I have often heard 
 it said that a speaker is dry, or that a sub- 
 ject is dry. Well, there isn't any subject in 
 the world that is dry. It is the person that 
 
 10
 
 handles it, and the person who receives it 
 that is dry. The subject is fertile enough. 
 But the trouble with most persons when 
 they handle a subject is that they handle it 
 as if it were a mere aggregate mass meant 
 to stay where it is placed; whereas it is 
 something to be absorbed into the pores, to 
 have the life circulation communicated to it, 
 and the moment you communicate that to 
 it, it itself becomes a vehicle of life. Every 
 one who touches a live thing knows he has 
 touched living tissue, and not a dead hand. 
 
 So that no knowledge is of any particular 
 consequence in this world which is not in- 
 carnate. For example, we are taught the 
 knowledge of the laws of hygiene, but what 
 earthly good are the laws of hygiene to us 
 if we do not live in obedience to them? 
 Presently disease springs upon us, and 
 Nature says, "Thou fool. You knew these 
 things. What profit is it to you to know 
 them and not to regard them in your way of 
 life? They were never yours. They were 
 never part of you. You never possessed 
 them." The moral of which is simply this, 
 that the truths which are not translated into 
 lives are dead truths, and not living truths. 
 The only way to learn grammatical speech 
 is to associate with those who speak gram- 
 matically. 
 
 And so of religion. Religion is com- 
 
 11
 
 municable, I verily believe, aside from the 
 sacred operations of the Holy Spirit, only 
 by example. You have only to ask yourself 
 what is the effect of a profession of religion 
 on the part of a man who does not live a 
 religious life. You know that the effect is 
 not only not to communicate religion, but 
 to delay indefinitely its influence. It is cer- 
 tainly true that we are not to judge religion 
 by those who profess it but do not live it. 
 But it is also true that if those who profess 
 it are the only ones we live with, and they 
 fail to live it, it cannot be communicated 
 except by some mysterious grace of the 
 Holy Spirit himself. So that no amount of 
 didactic teaching in a home whose life is not 
 Christian will ever get into the conscious- 
 ness and life of the children. If you wish 
 your children to be Christians, you must 
 really take the trouble to be Christians 
 yourselves. Those are the only terms upon 
 which the home will work the gracious 
 miracle. 
 
 And you cannot shift this thing by send- 
 ing your children to Sunday-school. You 
 may remedy many things, but you cannot 
 shift this responsibility. If the children do 
 not get this into their blood atmospherically, 
 they are not going to get it into their blood 
 at all until, it may be, they come to a period 
 of life where the influences of Christian lives 
 
 12
 
 outside of the home may profoundly affect 
 them and govern their consciences. We 
 must realize that the first and most intimate 
 and most important organization for the in- 
 doctrinating of the next generation is the 
 home, is the family. This is the key to the 
 whole situation. That is the reason that you 
 must get hold of the whole family when you 
 get hold of the children in your Sunday- 
 school work; that your work will not be 
 half done when you merely get the children 
 there, and it may be, their mothers. You 
 must include the fathers, and get your grip 
 upon the home organization in such wise 
 that the children will have the atmospheric 
 pressure of Christianity the week through. 
 We are constantly debating and hearing 
 it debated. How will the church get hold of 
 the young people? You cannot answer that 
 question unless you have a philosophy of 
 the matter. And it seems to me that the 
 inevitable philosophy of the matter is this: 
 There are only a certain number of things 
 that impress young persons, only a certain 
 number that impress old ones, or, for that 
 matter, that impress anybody. The things 
 that impress the young person and the old 
 are convictions and earnestness in action 
 that looks like business, and a certain 
 dignity and simplicity that go along with 
 being in earnest. You will notice that vv^hen 
 
 13
 
 a man is going about his business he does 
 not study his gestures, he does not consider 
 his poses, he does not think how he looks 
 when he is sitting at his desk in his chair. 
 There is a directness and simplicity of 
 approach in the thing which shows an utter 
 lack of self-consciousness. He is not think- 
 ing about the machinery by which he is 
 acting; he is after the thing. 
 
 When we say, therefore, that the way to 
 get young people to the church is to make 
 the church interesting, I am afraid v/e too 
 often mean that the way to do is to make it 
 entertaining. Did you ever know the theater 
 to be a successful means of governing con- 
 duct? Did you ever know the most excel- 
 lent concert, or series of concerts, to be the 
 means of revolutionizing a life? Did you 
 ever know any amount of entertainment to 
 go further than hold for the hour that it 
 lasted? If you mean to draw young people 
 by entertainment, you have only one excuse 
 for it, and that is to follow up the entertain- 
 ment with something that is not entertain- 
 ing, but which grips the heart like the touch 
 of a hand, I dare say that there is some 
 excuse for alluring persons to a place where 
 good will be done them, but I think it would 
 be a good deal franker not to allure them. I 
 think it would be a great deal better simply 
 to let them understand that that is the place 
 
 14
 
 where life is dispensed, and that if they 
 want life they must come to that place. 
 
 If they believe that you believe what you 
 say, they will come. If they have the least 
 suspicion that you do not believe it, if they 
 have the least suspicion that you are simply 
 playing a game of social organization, if 
 they have the notion that you are simply 
 organizing a very useful instrumentality of 
 society for moralizing the community, but 
 that you don't after all believe that life itself 
 lies in the doctrine and preaching of that 
 place and nowhere else, you cannot keep 
 hold of them very long. The only thing 
 that governs any of us is authority. And 
 the reason that it is harder to govern us 
 when we are grown up than when we are 
 young is that we question the authority, and 
 you have to convince our minds of the 
 reasonableness of the authority. But the 
 young mind yields to the authority that 
 believes in itself. That is the reason that 
 consistency of conduct is indispensable to 
 the maintenance of authority. You cannot 
 make the young person do what you do not 
 do yourself. You cannot make him believe 
 what you do not believe yourself. 
 
 I have known some parents who had very 
 deep doubt about some of the deeper mys- 
 teries of revelation, but who, nevertheless, 
 tried to communicate those deep mysteries 
 
 IS
 
 to their children, with an absolute lack of 
 success that was to have been expected. 
 They did not believe them themselves. Did 
 you never have the uneasy experience of 
 going into the presence of a child who did 
 not care to speak to you? There are two 
 beings who assess character instantly by 
 looking into the eyes, — dogs and children. 
 If a dog not naturally possessed of the devil 
 will not come to you after he has looked 
 you in the face, you ought to go home and 
 examine your ' conscience ; and if a little 
 child, from any other reason than mere 
 timidity, looks you in the face, and then 
 draws back and will not come to your knee, 
 go home and look deeper yet into your con- 
 science. There is no eye so searching as the 
 eye of simplicity. And you might as well 
 give up the attempt of trying to wear a 
 mask before children, particularly the mask 
 that you are so desirous of wearing, — the 
 mask of hypocrisy. It does not work, and it 
 is a very fortunate thing that it does not 
 work. If it did, we would make our children 
 as big hypocrites as we are. You must 
 believe the things you tell the children. 
 
 Have you not seen the flicker of the 
 child's eye when he first asked you if there 
 was really any Santa Claus, and you told 
 him yes? He knows something is the mat- 
 ter. He may not be shrewd enough or 
 
 16
 
 thoughtful enough to know what is the 
 matter, but after that he has his doubts 
 about Santa Claus, simply because, by some 
 electric communication that you cannot 
 stop, your doubts about Santa Claus have 
 been communicated to him. If you are a 
 positivist, he will be a positivist; if you 
 believe, he will believe. 
 
 It is all in the atmosphere. Sometimes 
 it seems to me that nine-tenths of what we 
 give other persons is in our personality. 
 The value of one man contrasted with 
 another is that some men have no electricity 
 in them. They might be in the room or out 
 of the room ; it doesn't make any difference. 
 Other men come into the room, and the 
 moment they come into it something hap- 
 pens, either attraction or repulsion. I can- 
 not sit in a railroad station comfortably, 
 because men will come in whom I want to 
 kick out, and persons will come in whom I 
 want to go up and speak to, and make 
 friends with, and I am restrained because 
 when I was small I was told that was not 
 good form, and I would not for the world be 
 unlike my fellow-men. So I sit still and try 
 to think about something else, and my eye 
 constantly wanders to some person whom it 
 would, I am sure, be such fun to go and talk 
 to, who I know has something I would like 
 to have. And yet, as for nine-tenths of the 
 
 17
 
 persons in the room, they do nothing but 
 vitiate the atmosphere, and you would 
 rather have their breathing room than their 
 presence. 
 
 And it is thus all through life. A man 
 comes to you to press a piece of business 
 upon you, and he goes away, and you say 
 to yourself, "No, I won't go into that." 
 
 And some one else says, "Why not? 
 Don't you believe in him?" 
 
 "No, I don't believe in him." 
 
 "Do you know anything wrong that he 
 ever did?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Didn't he verify his statements?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then why don't you go in with him?" 
 
 "Well, I don't know. I won't do it. I 
 don't like his looks. There was something 
 about him that made me think it was not all 
 straight, and, at any rate, I will look into it, 
 and hear about it from somebody else before 
 going any further." 
 
 We are constantly having that feeling. 
 And that is the feeling which illustrates my 
 thought, though I have gone pretty far 
 afield to illustrate it, — that it is conviction, 
 authority, simplicity, the directness of one 
 who is going about his business, and goes 
 about it with genuineness, which governs 
 young people. The moral of that is, that 
 
 18
 
 you are going the wrong way about accom- 
 plishing what you seek when you try to 
 make that entertaining which, in the nature 
 of things, though engrossing, is not enter- 
 taining in the ordinary sense of the word. 
 
 To tell a human being of the things that 
 affect his eternal salvation I should say is 
 decidedly under-described if you call it 
 entertaining. It is not entertaining in any 
 reasonable sense of the word to tell him of 
 the things that most profoundly affect his 
 welfare in this world and in the next. I 
 know that there are ways of telling men the 
 truth which repel them; I know that too 
 many men are tried for by efforts which 
 merely frighten. I believe that too much 
 effort is made to get people to believe for 
 fear of the consequences of unbelief. I don't 
 believe any man was ever drawn into 
 heaven for fear he would go to hell. 
 Because, if I understand the Scriptures in 
 the least, they speak a gospel of love. 
 Except God draw you, you are not drawn. 
 You are not brought in by whips, you are 
 not drawn by a frowning face, you are not 
 drawn by a threatening gesture. You are 
 drawn by love, you are drawn by the knowl- 
 edge that if you come you will be received 
 as a son. Nothing but yearning draws you. 
 Fear never drew you anywhere. 
 
 You must realize that it is all a question 
 
 19
 
 of personal relationship between man and 
 his Maker, and a personal relationship 
 founded upon love. For love is the only 
 thing that I know that ever led to self-abne- 
 gation. Ambition does not lead to it ; no use 
 of power for power's sake leads to anything 
 but self-aggrandizement. Can you name me 
 any motive in the world that ever led a man 
 to love another life more than his own ex- 
 cept the motive of love? And yet what we 
 are working for in the young people, as in 
 the old, is to show them the perfect image 
 of a Man who will draw all the best powers 
 of their nature to Himself, and make them 
 love him so that they will love him more 
 than they love themselves, and loving him 
 so, will love their fellow-men more than 
 they love themselves. Everything heroic, 
 everything that looks toward salvation is 
 due to this power of elevation. It is a note- 
 worthy thing that we reserve the beautiful 
 adjective "noble" for the men who think 
 less of themselves than of some cause or of 
 some person whom they serve. We elevate 
 to the only nobility we have, the nobility of 
 moral greatness, only those men who are 
 governed by love. 
 
 You cannot create love by entertainment, 
 but you can make love by the perfect exhi- 
 bition of Christ-like qualities, and, with the 
 assistance of the Holy Spirit, by the with- 
 
 20
 
 drawal of the veil which for most men 
 hangs before the face of our Lord and 
 Saviour. Our whole object, it seems to me, 
 in church work is simply this: to enable all 
 to see him, to realize him, and if we devote 
 ourselves to that purpose with singleness 
 of heart and without thought of ourselves, 
 we shall suddenly find the seats filling, 
 because where there is fire thither men will 
 carry their lamps to be lighted. Where 
 there is power, men will go to partake of it. 
 Every human soul instinctively feels that 
 the only power he desires, the only power 
 that can relieve him from the tedium of the 
 day's work, the only thing which can put a 
 glow upon the routine of the day's task, the 
 only thing that can take him back to the 
 golden age when everything had a touch of 
 magic about it, when everything was 
 greater than the fact, when everything had 
 lurking behind it some mysterious power, 
 when there was in everything a vision and 
 a perfect image, — is this thing which he 
 sees enthroned upon the shining coun- 
 tenances of those who really believe in the 
 life and saving grace of their Lord and 
 Master. 
 
 21
 
 
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