a fine group of young men who are preparing to enter Y. M. C. A. work in Poland, and there is another group who are going as medical missionaries to China. These men," he declared, "are still animated by a desire to serve humanity."
No sensible person can have the slightest wish to disparage the work of the Y. M. C. A. in Poland or of the medical missionaries in China. Yet one is constrained to say that the remarks of this good dean illustrate exactly the attitude of mind which has tended to bring the "old watchword of service" into disrepute. I mean this: that among the young generation there is a growing resentment, and I think on the whole a legitimate resentment, at the traditional identification of service with certain definitely limited activities of an obviously humanitarian character, performed for the physically or morally needy classes in foreign lands or in the slums of great cities or backward rural districts. These moral and medical missionaries are engaged, we all admit, in a great work, which demands devotion and self-sacrifice. But their champions make a mistake in tactics, they damage their own position, when they attempt to set apart these special types of activitiy under a peculiar glory of "service."
