The sectarian divisions which in the vast needs and resources of great cities do not so acutely menace church efficiency prove serious in the small town. The saloon, poolroom, livery stable, and other haunts of the idle are open for boys; but the Christian people, because of their denominational differences, maintain no social headquarters and no institution in which boys may find healthy expression for their normal interests. The Y.M.C.A. is impracticable, because the church people are already overtaxed in keeping up their denominational competition and so cannot contribute enough to run an association properly. Wherever an association cannot be conducted by trained and paid officers it will result in disappointment. The caricature of essential Christianity which is afforded by the denominational exhibit in the village works great harm to boys. It is not only that they are deprived of that guidance which true Christianity would give them, but they are confronted from the first with a spectacle of pettiness, jealousy, and incompetency which they will probably forever associate with Christianity, at least in its ecclesiastical forms. Villages are at best sufficiently susceptible to those unfortunate human traits that make for clique and cleavage in society, and when the Christian church, instead of unifying and exalting the community life, adds several other divisive interests with all the authority of religion, the hope of intelligent, united, and effective service for the community, on a scale that would arouse the imagination and enlist the good-will of all right-minded people, is made sadly remote. So far as church work is concerned, the village boy is likely to be overlooked, as promising little toward the immediate financial support of the church and the increase of membership. In the brief interval of two years--the average duration of the village pastorate--it does not seem practicable for the minister to go about a work which will require a much longer time to produce those "satisfactory results" for which churches and missionary boards clamor. A revival effort which inflates the membership-roll, strenuous and ingenious endeavors to increase the offerings, are the barren makeshifts of a policy which does not see the distinct advantage and security in building Christian manhood from the foundation up. It must not be thought that the minister is largely to blame for the situation as it now is. Perpetuating institutions beyond the time of their usefulness is one of society's worst habits, and it is not to be expected that religious organizations, which in a given stage of the development of Christian truths were vital and necessary, can easily be persuaded to surrender their identity, even after the cause that called them into being has been won. Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great has passed away.