360 RELIGIOUS AGENCIES 



to do. The advantages resulting from such acquaintanceship and conference are 

 too numerous and too evident for cataloguing here. Lack of information about 

 each other has been responsible for most of the bitterness sometimes shown by 

 good enterprises and people toward one another. All that is not good in both 

 sectionalism and sectarianism is the unhappy result of living too far apart. 

 The Religious Education Association, if it shall accomplish all it aims at, be- 

 coming at once a clearing house for correct religious educational ideas, a rallying 

 centre for sincere seekers after the best ways for deA'eloping the religious and 

 moral character of the young, a confederation sufficiently strong, safe, and 

 sane to merit the partisanship of all who desire that religious and moral education 

 shall become the best of all education, and a non-partisan but trustworthy and 

 helpful friend of every deserving individual, church, Sunday-school Association, 

 Young People's Society, or other organization in any way engaged in religious 

 education if, let it be repeated, the Religious Education Association accom- 

 plishes all of this, and if in ever increasing numbers the leaders in the religious and 

 educational life of the United States and Canada continue to participate in its 

 management and its conventions, as there is every reason to expect them to do, 

 there will continue to be a correspondingly growing need for every existing 

 agency of religious education, every church and association, society or institu- 

 tion of any kind that, without desiring the destruction of any other worthy 

 agency of religious education, is doing the best it can its own duty. 



With the help of all for the Religious Education Association, then, the Religious 

 Education Association would be helpful to all ; and with or without the help of all 

 it would supplant none, but supplement the good influences of every one of the 

 agencies at work in every part of the field of religious education. How it will 

 undertake to do this cannot be explained in the compass of this brief com- 

 munication, but by corresponding with the association's executive office, Asso- 

 ciation Building, Chicago, the interested can secure the desired information. 



