We, however, are concerned only with the boy at the gang age. His problem is simple in theory,--and anything but simple in practice. Preaching at this stage does him little good, nor does form and ritual. He should already have fixed his habits; now is the time for ideals and dreams. The boy is instinctively a nature worshiper, and the one essential thing is to get him out of doors in company with the right sort of man. This is no time for bible or hymn book; there is time enough for these both before and after. What the boy wants now is to learn about life. To set him at Sunday School lessons under a woman teacher is a pedagogic crime. We need, then, in church and Sunday School, for influencing boys at the gang age, simple manliness far more than we need either learning or piety. If we have done our full duty by the boy up to the age of twelve, and if we are prepared to go on with his formal religious instruction after he passes sixteen, we may safely leave the welfare of his soul for these intervening four years to nature and to the unconscious example of almost any good man. For boys at the gang age, I would choose as a Sunday School teacher the sort of man who makes a good scout-master, even if he himself made no profession of religion whatever, rather than the stanchest pillar of the church who has forgotten his boyhood, or than the most angelic maiden lady that ever lived. This is one of the cases where the children of this world have been appreciably wiser than the children of light. _The Gang and the Sunday School_ Of the gang and the Sunday School, as apart from the church, little need be added to what has already been said. The common mistake is to pick out the proper number of boys, of about the proper age, but with small regard to their other qualities, and out of these to form a class. The result is, that unless the teacher possesses most uncommon gifts, the class never has any coherence. It is not a natural group, and it never develops the internal structure of a real gang. There may be too many natural leaders. There may be too few. Or the class may combine fragments of rival gangs that are “licking” one another on sight, six days in the week. More commonly, the class contains a considerable fragment of one gang, with one or two individuals out of several others, and perhaps an occasional out-lier who belongs to none. The remainders of the broken gangs are in other Sunday Schools. Thus the class remains always at cross purposes with the boys’ native impulses; and rarely, therefore, wins their instinctive loyalty.