Two years ago, at a conference, a girl of sixteen from a fashionable boarding-school, coming from a home where fads and fashions rule, said to me, "I never knew Christ was so wonderful, but then I have never thought much about it, though I go to morning service in the winter. I have never met women and girls like those I have seen this week; they are so interesting,--they are doing so many things to help people,--they seem to love to live. I don't want to live a mean, selfish kind of life. I am going back to school for my last year. What can I do? How can I help?" I have met many girls of whom she is the type. Little is being done for the spiritual side of their natures. The Sunday-school at present does not reach them to any great extent. One of the greatest problems facing the fashionable church is how to reach in any way girls in their teens who are members of its congregation. Such girls with their abundance of life have at least a right to those things offered in the Sunday-school which will mean the awakening and developing of the spirit. They need teachers especially equipped in every way to meet them and help them. To find such teachers is one of the problems that must be met within the next few years. Perhaps we may look confidently for help before long to the girls of culture and refinement now in our colleges hard at work upon every kind of problem dealing with the development of a better life for girls and women. For these girls are beginning to look at the Sunday-school seriously as the means of bringing moral and religious education to girls of all classes, and are asking how they may best equip themselves for service in its various departments.
The problem of the other girl is just as great. She works all the week, and when on Sunday morning she is tired, the family sympathize. She gradually drops out of Sunday-school, is not able because of her long hours to enter into the work of the church, does not come into contact with any vitalizing spiritual force, and slowly this part of her nature, lacking food and stimulus, begins to die. She spends Sunday afternoon and evening socially, and enters upon the new week's work with no uplift of soul and spirit to help her when temptations come.