She asks with a new earnestness, “Are the miracles true?” “Is the Bible different from other books?” Only last week a girl of eighteen, suffering with her dearest friend, whose brother had been sentenced to a term in prison for gross intoxication, said to me: “That man prays often when he is sober to be kept from drinking, how can God let him do it when it is just killing his mother and all the family? I don’t see how it can be true that God loves men when he lets them be so wicked, and when people suffer so, and starve and die in wrecks and fires and—it’s terrible. I know you will think I’m awful, but sometimes I don’t believe in God at all.” Her voice trembled, and I knew the hurried sentences represented months of thinking. I did not consider her “awful.” God help her—she has looked the old, old problem of evil squarely in the face for the first time, and is staggered by it. How to help her in this crisis we shall consider in our discussion of the “Spiritual Side.”
She needs now more than ever a teacher who can understand her, who has thought things out for herself, who can teach positively, who is too near life to worship creed, and too large to be dogmatic. One so often wishes, when looking into the face of some thoughtful girl, with mind keen, alert, active, but perplexed and confused by knowledge that seems to contradict itself, for some miracle by which for a moment the Great Teacher might come and speak to her the words that made his doubting pupil say, “My Lord and my God.”
The mental activity of the girl of to-day reveals itself in the later teens by a keen and deep interest in social questions, in the great problems that concern women. But a few weeks since I looked into the faces of scores of earnest college girls, many in their later teens, who were discussing at a week-end conference, “The Individual and the Social Crisis.” It was not a mere discussion. These girls had plans, they had facts, they were looking at the question on all sides. Within the month I met another group in conference. They were a “Welfare Committee” for an organization of working girls. They knew what they were talking about, they had plans, and were seeking solutions for problems that needed to be solved.
The girl in her teens is a dreamer at thirteen, seeking to realize her dreams in real life at nineteen.
During those six wonderful years of repeated crises, the mental life of the girl is being shaped and determined by environment. To some extent the teacher may influence that environment, and become a real part of it. It is her privilege to furnish the imagination, through prose and poetry, with fields in which to wander afar, broaden the vision through books of travel and information which she may put in the girl’s way, increase her love of music and pictures through occasional concerts and visits to the art galleries, and in scores of little ways open new doors to the greater realms of knowledge which, if unaided, she would have passed by.
It is a great thing to be able to help another mind to think for itself. That, the wise teacher is always striving to do. She challenges her girls to think. This is the reason why she wants the girl in her teens to know something of the history of the church; to be acquainted with the young men and women on the mission field, and know what they are doing; to know what the cities are trying or refusing to do for the housing of the poor, and for the protection of women and girls; to know the laws of home hygiene, and to use her mental faculties to help answer the question of the relation of the church and the individual under existing conditions in her own community and in the world. The girl in her teens is interested most in the very thing in which the Great Teacher was himself interested—life, the life of his own day, and he so instructed his disciples that the eyes of their understanding were opened and they began to think for themselves and of their fellow-men.
We have to-day, in the girl in her teens, who in large numbers is still in our Sunday-schools, a tremendous mental force. Were it awakened and developed, helped to see and interpret life according to the principles of Jesus, in fifty years the church would find most of its present problems solved. For hard to realize as it is when looking into the faces and training the minds of the girls in their teens of to-day, still it is true that we are looking at and training the women of to-morrow, yes, those who a few years hence holding their children in their arms, shall decide all unknowing what the next generation of men and women shall be and do.
To encourage the girl in her teens to use her mental powers to the utmost, to help her gain knowledge and self-control, to guide her in her thinking, is the task of every parent and teacher, and it is a task tremendously worth while.