MARRIAGE, HONEYMOON, AND
THE THEOLOGY OF REVIVALISM

ON the 16th June, 1855, William Booth and Catherine Mumford, both of them being twenty-six years of age, were married by the Rev. Dr. Thomas at the Stockwell New Chapel in South London. Mr. Mumford was present at this wedding and one of William Booth’s sisters. No other minister assisted Dr. Thomas, and there was no congregation.

The honeymoon was spent at Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, the bride and bridegroom occupying those comfortable lodgings of which William Booth had heard a good account in the north of England. One week was devoted to this delicate foundation of married life, and then the Reverend and Mrs. William Booth, of the Methodist New Connexion, started off for a religious campaign in Guernsey.

It is time to say that these revivals, into which the Booths threw themselves with an enthusiasm scarcely to be matched by the earliest Christians, rose out of a theological ground which was then universally accepted by the Church. Whether we may think that ground narrow or false, it was the foundational theology of the period — a ground, moreover, which no man could even reverently criticize without the startling consequence of finding himself numbered among the infidels.

The Booths, standing on this acknowledged ground, were perfectly logical in their action; those who stood on the same ground, and yet contented themselves with a tepid discharge of formal duties, were guilty of the disastrous offence which English people are most ready to forgive, namely, an incredible lack of imagination.

What was this theological ground universally acknowledged by the Church? One can state it so mildly that it may be accepted by the great body of orthodox Christians even at this day; it can be stated with such brutal realism as might have startled even the flaming spirits of William and Catherine Booth fifty years ago.

In its mildest form this theology taught that entrance into Heaven could only be secured by faith in the Redemption of Christ; that man was so inherently corrupt in his nature that without the help of Almighty God he could do nothing to please Him: and that until he bowed his sinful will to the Divine Will, acknowledging Christ as his Saviour and Redeemer, he stood in dreadful peril of eternal damnation. In its more dogmatic form this theology taught that every human creature born into the world was under sentence of death, and that condemnation and wrath awaited those who refused to acknowledge the death of Christ as at once a consequence of their own personal guilt and an atonement for the sins of the whole world.

Hell was indubitably regarded as the certain portion of all sinners, the just portion, indeed, of all who rejected Christ; and Hell was, also indubitably, pictured as a region of unspeakable misery which would endure for everlasting.

It must strike every honest mind that a man who entertained this theology and truthfully believed its implications must have had a heart of stone or a quite dead imagination to go quietly, peacefully, and contentedly about his business.

To eat a meal when thousands were slipping into eternal Hell only a few yards from the table; to go happily to rest when thousands more were hurling themselves over the brink into those undying flames within a walk of one’s comfortable bed; to stand at the reading desk or to mount the pulpit stairs with a written sermon in one’s cassock-pocket, while thousands upon thousands of people remained outside the church doors satisfied with their sins, blackened with iniquity, and condemned to an unending agony of irremediable remorse — surely this was to be illogical, incomprehensible, utterly unimaginative, dead to every vestige of feeling.

Far more logical was the action of revivalists. They not only professed the accepted theology of Christendom, but they lived their lives as if it were the veritable truth of the universe. They fought Satan as if they saw him face to face; they struggled to drag the souls of men from the edge of eternal torment; they seized the shoulders of the sleepers and bade them wake and be saved; they could not rest, nor find lasting pleasure in life, while thousands of their fellow-creatures were sinking into everlasting ruin ignorant of the means of obtaining everlasting felicity; their whole existence was an agony to rouse the torpid souls of a perishing world.

There is really nothing to excuse in the fervour and incitements of such men as William Booth if we remember their honest convictions. On the other hand, the frigid and decorous lives of their orthodox contemporaries, if we consider their theological foundation, demand an apology so subtle and tortuous that it might baffle even the cunning of a Newman to give it any form of expression short of the grotesque.
Sydney Smith’s essay on “Methodism,” which diverted readers of The Edinburgh Review and gave an elaborate satisfaction to the erudite Establishment, makes no mention whatever of this foundational teaching of the Church.

“The Methodists,” he said, “are always desirous of making men more religious than it is possible, from the constitution of human nature, to make them.” Whether he ever preached a sermon from the text, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled,” or from the injunction, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,” we do not know and are not greatly concerned to discover; but much would we give and to great pains would we most willingly put ourselves to ascertain the precise condition of the delightful and witty Canon’s state of mind when reciting at public worship those pronouncements of the Church which declare the everlasting damnation of the wicked.

But the only serious question for the reader of this history concerns the honesty of the Booths. Did they really believe what they taught? Did they conscientiously and implicitly hold as the very truth of existence that escape from Hell could only be secured by faith in the Atonement of Christ? Were they passionate and wholehearted seekers of the lost, burningly, unselfishly set upon the saving of souls, truthfully convinced that they held the commission of Christ; or were they merely the mountebanks of religious history, charlatans out for gain and notoriety, detestable hypocrites teaching what they did not believe, living clean contrary to their profession, laughing up their sleeves in secret at the victims of their cleverness?

“We are for common sense orthodoxy,” said Sydney Smith. What, then, were the Booths for? — what was their share, if any, in this rare conjunction of common sense and orthodox religion?

The letters which have appeared in previous chapters entirely answer any reasonable question on the head of honesty. No unprejudiced person can read those remarkable letters without convincing himself that perhaps truer and more honest souls never lived than this obscure Methodist preacher and the woman who shared the burden of his vocation. It would be impossible for any man however malicious to prove them dishonest. Honest they were in heart and soul, too honest for their peace and comfort, too honest for their worldly prosperity.

But, a more difficult question remains to be answered. One asks whether William Booth, William Booth particularly —William Booth with his shrewd common sense and his obstinate self-questionings, his doubts and scepticisms even in the midst of the religious excitation which he himself had brought about — whether he had honourably assured himself that what he proclaimed so loudly and so convincingly from the platform expressed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of God’s relation with humanity?

The easiest answer to this question is supplied in letters written by the man himself in later life. He acknowledged that his outlook at this time was narrow; he confessed that he was guilty of ignorance and of inexperience.

But by this he did not mean that he ever wished his early work undone, or that he had deceived himself in the doing of it; he meant that he had circumscribed his labours to religious circles; that he had not realized the immense part played in human tragedy by ignorance and poverty and pardonable frailty; that he had not sounded so deeply as he came to sound with larger experience the boundless charity of God.

He was a man, as we can never tire of emphasizing, whose mind developed and whose character ripened to the very last. He was always in the act of growth. Therefore, without personal bias of any kind, with an actual distaste for the violence and excesses of revivalism, one must acquit him of any degree of self-deception or any inclination to shirk the ordeal of a searching analysis of his beliefs. He believed, as his letters overwhelmingly prove, that any temptation to desist from seeking the instant salvation of his fellows, any inclination to modify his methods, any whispering doubt as to his future, his health, or his happiness, came from the enemy of his soul.

Faith in Satan was tremendously real to him. He felt himself called by God; he knew himself tempted in a hundred directions from a perfectly pure response to that call; and those doubts and questionings, which his intellectual power was unable to face and answer, he ascribed, naturally and logically, to the forces of evil.

I believe him to have been as honest a man as ever found himself governed by a religious conscience. I believe him to have been a man who made mistakes, who was perhaps ignorant, who was often thoughtless, and who was too easily satisfied that the Devil whispered every objection that rose from the depths to the surface of his consciousness; further, I believe that he accustomed himself to employ in the service of righteousness methods for which his taste, if definitely challenged in later years, would have expressed no approval, and of which his intellect, patiently summoned to give judgment, would have offered a settled condemnation; but I am convinced that from the very first to the very last the man’s soul was wholesome and true, that he acted from an absolute purity of motive, that he was as selfless as any man in modern conditions of life can ever hope to be in seeking the welfare and the salvation of his fellow-creatures.

Revivalism can be presented to the judgment of men in such a manner as to inspire only disgust and horror. Even when fairly and justly presented it makes no powerful appeal to contemporary imagination. Mankind has passed away from the ancient thesis of a distant and an angered God; theology, except in Rome, has ranged itself with science at-md philosophy in a search for the truth of life; Christology has created in the wistful heart of multitudes an infinitely more beautiful idea of the Incarnation: men now deeply, hopefully, and quietly believe that the Spirit of God is associated with humanity in an evolution of being which goes from transcendence to transcendence in an infinite circle of increasing existence; but with this newer and enlarged theology, with this deeper and therefore more boundless faith, who that widely knows the world can truthfully say that even now the hour of revivalism is past, that the cry to the multitude, Awake out of sleep, is not still as urgent and as divinely inspired as it was in the earliest days of William and Catherine Booth?

This history will show, I think, that the revivalism of the Booths in its first manifestations was at least justified by the state of theological knowledge, and that in its later and more humane activities it was, is still, and is likely for n-many more years yet to be, entirely justified by the condition of human society.

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I shall not weary the reader with a laborious chronicle of their early revivals; my purpose is to show, so far as their own letters will supply the evidence, the human side of these revivalists and the many difficulties of their social history. I am more anxious to make their personalities real and intimate to posterity than to establish the successes, great or small, which accompanied their progress through the cities of England.

The work by which they will be known down the centuries is not the work of their early revivalism, but the establishment of the Salvation Army —and that alone is an organization whose activity covers so vast an area of the earth’s surface that many volumes would scarcely suffice to relate its history.

My purpose, then, is to supply in this place as faithful a portrait as my materials and my powers will permit of the man who came through Methodism and through itinerant revivalism to the founding of an entirely new body of Christians, a body of Christians whose influence has already left a permanent impression upon all the Churches and nearly all the domestic politics of the world. I shall use the history of the early revivalism only so far as it subserves this chief purpose, so far as it helps us to see, to hear, and to know the man William Booth.

It is more necessary to understand the spirit of that revivalism, to understand it, and to sympathize with it in the manner we have already suggested, than to learn that such a town was visited in such a year, and that in the prayer-meeting so many came to the penitent form, and so many were “good cases.” The contemporary reader, I think, will thank me for sparing him all such troublesome details, and certainly the only judgment that posterity will pass upon this book will concern the vigour of the portrait it attempts to paint of a man whose character will be of curious attraction as long as the world is interested in the history of religion.

The revivalism of William Booth proceeded from the depths of his own soul as well as from his theological convictions. He was a man sharply conscious of his own faults, plagued by temptations of body and mind, the unhappy victim of a morbid infirmity. So far as the current theology confirmed his settled opinion that every ill wish which visited his mind came from Satan, the adversary of souls, so far theology influenced his conduct.

But it was really this presence in himself, this continual companionship, of a nature inferior to that higher nature of which he was conscious in moods of religious exaltation; the perpetual haunting, the unlifting pressure of an evil spirit antagonistic to his peace; the breath upon his cheek, the whisper in his ear, the guidance at his elbow, the flame and fire perpetually within his blood of a demon plotting the eternal ruin of his soul — it was this root of evil in himself, and not theology, which drove him first upon his knees and then into the streets as a preacher of salvation.

Nothing was more certain to him than the existence of Satan — the proof thereof tortured his own heart. So evil did he feel himself to be that his thought was not in the least staggered by the punishment of eternal Hell. So profoundly conscious was he in moments of religious peace of a relief from this inner torment that he could believe it came only from the mercy of God, a gift of the Son who had died to save his soul from death.

Thus, so far as theology confirmed his experience, he was a theologian; but it was out of his own travail of soul that he fashioned his religion; and religion for him, from first to last, was a matter of the most personal and piercing experience. He feared and hated the Devil; he adored the Son of God, who had given him the victory over sin. Saturated through and through, penetrated and interpenetrated by this sense of an overwhelming gratitude to Christ; conscious, also, in himself of the most pervasive and sufficing happiness in his union with God, what could he do but go to those in darkness and ignorance, proclaiming with a vociferation, never mind how loud and alarming, the good news of a free and perfect salvation?

In an account he has given us of one of his earliest sermons — that under which the daughter of his tutor, Dr. Cooke, was converted — we see with perfect clearness the simple character of his theology at this time — he was then 22 — and also the driving force of personal experience at the back of his preaching:

I described a wreck on the ocean, with the affrighted people clinging to the masts between life and death, waving a flag of distress to those on shore, and, in response, the life-boat going off to the rescue. . . . I reminded my hearers that they had suffered shipwreck on the ocean of time through their sins and rebellion; that they were sinking down to destruction, but that if they would only hoist the signal of distress Jesus Christ would send off the life-boat to their rescue. Then. jumping on the seat at the back of the pulpit, I waved my pocket-handkerchief round and round my head to represent the signal of distress I wanted them to hoist.

One’s first instinct is to shudder. Without being supercilious or hypersensitive one may justly shrink from the contemplation of this violent preacher with his waving handkerchief. But to be perfectly just, one must ask whether the current theology, the theology everywhere accepted, proclaimed, and even used as a menace to mankind, did not vindicate that leap to the seat at the back of the pulpit, did not justify the waving of that pocket-handkerchief round the preacher’s head?

Is it true that millions of souls are shipwrecked, are sinking down to destruction — everlasting destruction? Is it true that they have only to cry to the Saviour of the world to be lifted out of the dark waters? Most important of all, is it true that unless they do so call for mercy and forgiveness, the undying worm and the unquenchable flame will feed upon their tortured souls for evermore?

If this be so, if this is indeed the teaching of the Church, can any method be indecorous, any tone too strident, any gesture too violent, any antic too shocking and startling, that rouses even one perishing soul to escape a calamity so unthinkable as remorse and agony prolonged throughout the ages of eternity? Again, one must in fairness contend that the perfectly polite and unruffled seemliness of the orthodox, who cherish this theology as the truth of God, is a matter not only indefensible to casuistry but repellent to the most primitive instincts of humanity.

This sermon of the waving handkerchief is important because it helps one to understand the crude theology of William Booth at the beginning of his career, and to see how real was the experience from which he drew this violent illustration. He clearly held that every soul born into human life was in peril of everlasting destruction; he believed that every living soul, by its sins and rebellion, merited destruction; that destruction must infallibly be its lot but for the Atonement of Christ; and there his theology ended and his humanity began.

No intellectual test was asked, no adherence was demanded to a string of self-contradicting formulae; all that was needed even of the very worst was a cry from the heart of their own helplessness for the mercy and forgiveness of an Infinite Christ.

But there was something more, he tested the reality of that cry. He did not tell these troubled and affrighted souls that they had only to give up their sins, join a church, and go regularly to the public worship of God in order to be certain of an angel’s destiny in Paradise; he told them that they must be born again; that they themselves at the very centre of their being must suffer a will change so utter, a transformation so complete, a conversion so unerring, that the very face of life should appear to them for evermore altered and transfigured.

The cry was their part — and they could do no more than cry; the change was the miracle of God. If their cry came very truly from the grief of a broken heart, from the bitter knowledge that of themselves they could do nothing to save themselves from judgment and destruction; then, of a surety, the miracle would descend swiftly to their relief.

From the very first he preached this essential need of conversion, and never once did he make the forgiveness of God to depend either upon the easiness of a life of repentance or the difficulty of a theological proposition. He made it hard for the sinner, but only hard for his heart where it was a greater hardness that alone stood in the way of divine mercy.

This theology of William Booth was not greatly modified by experience; in later life, with a knowledge of the human heart probably unrivalled, he saw the same teaching of this old theology with an infinitely wider vision; but it must be confessed that he remained to the very end of his days a most intractable Philistine as regards the entire region of the intellect.

What was merely a loose intuition in this respect during youth became in age a settled conviction. He detested the arrogance of dogmatic science. In the impatience of his sorrow for the oppressed he considered literature and the fine arts as the mere playthings of a childish humanity. He turned his back on philosophy, as being often a trick of the Devil to catch mankind with the delusions of the reason. He was born a provincial, and he remained a provincial. He was not born a Hebraist, hut he made himself the most uncompromising Hebraist of his time.

He must always be judged as a man who, for the sake of Christ, denied his period and lived without enthusiasm for human inquiry.

When we consider these things, remembering at the same time that he held the generally accepted theology of his day, we shall more easily sympathize with the spirit of his revivalism. He knew little or nothing of textual criticism, nothing of historical criticism, nothing of German theology; nothing of psychology, nothing of philosophy, nothing of physical science. He knew nothing of architecture, nothing of painting, and nothing of classical music.

Furthermore, at this period of his career he knew very little indeed of life; was acquainted, indeed, only with the dissenting aspect of the commonwealth, was in touch only with the outermost suburbs of human society. When he married Catherine Mumford he was an ill-educated pastor of a section of the Methodist body, a man only remarkable for the intensity of his feelings, the honesty of his nature, and the power of his oratory.

But the reader of his letters must already have perceived that while he was this, and while on the surface he was nothing more, there was in the depths of his rough, wilful, and untutored being a gnawing hunger and a consuming thirst for sanctification, a great struggle for spiritual perfection, and a dogged, obstinate, unconquerable passion to do the will of God against the obstruction of Hell itself.

Again and again throughout his letters there is the same foreshadowing of an ultimate immortality that exists, calmly and quietly, in the most perfect and imperishable of Shakespeare’s sonnets — a cry, as it were, from the dark blackness of a soul overshadowed by the powers of evil and wretched with poverty, ignorance, and a will pulling contrary to the divine, a cry that somewhere, somehow, and somewhen he will veritably strike an immortal blow for God and his fellow-men.

It is this conviction of a destiny, this heroic faith in a high calling on the part of a man hampered by physical weakness and hindered on every hand by authority and indifference, which most interests us in William Booth as a revivalist, helping us to maintain our sympathy, and to expect a greater man.

First to his youthful friends in Nottingham, and afterwards with a much greater intensity and a far more persistent reiteration to Catherine Mumford, he confided this feeling within himself of a power to do something for the salvation of man which should add fresh glory to religion. His friends believed in him, and Catherine Mumford, warning him against ambition, believed in him too.

After long years of wandering in the wilderness he was to enter the promised land and to justify this faith in his destiny

Chapter 17

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