A BOY LOST by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 24, 1904

A BOY LOST.

By Editor

It is not supposition or invention that is pictured in the following extract from the Ram's Horn. It is all too true. It is a condition, and not a theory; and it is not only a boy lost, but a girl lost, and not one of each only, but many, very many of both. The condition is the result of that waning of natural affection, which the Word foretells as one of the signs of the last days. 2 Tim. 3:3.

A boy is lost! The papers describe him as the only child of his parents, who are heart-broken over his absence, and who say that he is the best boy in the world. Sixteen years old; he is tall and large for his age, and wore when he went away, a dark, mixed striped suit, blue cotton shirt, white, turned-down collar, dark-blue peaked cap, and a dark Oxford gray overcoat. His mother, who is a member of the State Federation of Women's Clubs and of the Daughters of the American Revolution, appeals to all friends and club women to aid in the search for her missing son. The father is a well-known traveling man, and he, too, asks his friends to render whatever help they can in locating the boy. The boy is lost, and, if we read rightly between the lines, the mother is lost, too. The father, a well-known traveling man, has to be away from home, of course, most of the time. The mother is a club woman. That tells the story. Is it any wonder the boy is lost? Who trained him in the way he should go? Who warned him of certain temptations that lurk in the pathway of every boy and girl of sixteen years? Who tucked in the blankets at night, and kissed his pure eyelids to sleep and whispered, "God loves you, and mother loves you, my boy"? His mother was at the club wrestling with problems which look bigger in print than those of menial drudgery in the kitchen and in the nursery. Will they look bigger in eternity? Perhaps they will when some lost mothers meet their lost boys and reflect that it is they, the mothers, who abandoned the most priceless charge that God commits to human beings. All eternity can not rectify the error. A lot of us may rectify it now, if we will take warning of lost boys and lost girls all around us.

The discussion of domestic problems in clubs is taking the place of their working out in the home, surrounded by the young lives entrusted to the parents of that home. Club life is driving a wedge between parents and children, splitting the family circle into fragments, and disintegrating the otherwise powerful holding influence of the home. While the mother discusses problems that may exist, the children are creating problems that can not be settled by discussion. Among them is the problem of their growing away from parental influence. That question can be settled only by close association, constant Christian sympathy personally applied, tender, impelling love abundantly made manifest, and all directed by the Spirit of the Master in the life of the parent. But this manner of dealing with that problem is on the wane rather than on the increase, and, as a result, children are growing out into the world rather than up into Christlikeness. They are being lost, lost in the world, lost out of the lives of fathers and mothers, lost to the influences of the Gospel, and are helping to swell the great army of those who are finally and eternally lost. The condition which is bringing this about is fast increasing in the world, and is one of the signs of its approaching dissolution.