THE MOVE TO LONDON

By a strange chance it was Mrs. Booth who led the way out of the wilderness. It was she, and not William Booth, who laid the first stone of the Salvation Army.
While they were still living in Leeds, and he was still thinking of taking a house in Sheffield, and establishing his family there, Mrs. Booth was invited to Rotherhithe in South East London, and thither she journeyed, in 1865, to conduct a brief mission.

What she saw of the poor people, and particularly the work being done by the Midnight Movement to restore fallen women, made an instant and overwhelming appeal to her heart. She resolved at once that here was the sphere for which she had prayed and longed ever since the Conference in Liverpool.

It is remarkable that some little time before this mission in Rotherhithe was even suggested, Mrs. Booth wrote a letter to her mother in which she prophesied the new departure. After speaking of the coldness of the churches and the hardness of the world, she said:

Well, we must labour and wait a little longer, it may be the clouds will break and surround us with sunshine. Anyway, God lives above the clouds, and He will direct our path. If the present effort disappoints us I shall feel quite tired of tugging with the churches, and shall insist on William taking a hall or theatre somewhere. I believe the Lord will thrust him into that sphere yet. We can’t get at the masses in the chapels. . . . I think I shall come and try in London before long.

Mrs. Booth’s mission was a considerable success. In some measure this success was no doubt due to the interest created by a “Female Minister”; bills were circulated with the attractive invitation, “Come and Hear a Woman Preach “; notices of her mission were published in some of the religious papers; crowds flocked to hear her as a new excitement.

But the real cause of this unquestionable success was the profound spiritual apprehension which inspired her oratory. No one who heard Mrs. Booth speak could fail to be moved by her eloquence — an eloquence entirely natural and entirely free from rhetoric. She spoke with an overwhelming persuasiveness because she was overwhelmingly persuaded of the truth of Christianity, and because she felt in the depths of her heart and in every fibre of her sensitive being the frightful sufferings, the destructive miseries, and the unutterable anguish of souls imprisoned in the darkness of sin.

Her mind — thanks, no doubt, in some measure to the influence of William Booth — was clean of Pharisaism. There was nothing there which was narrow or mean. As for her heart, it was the heart of a woman to whom love and compassion are the very breath of existence. A brief account in The Wes-leyan Times of a meeting of the Midnight Movement, in which Mrs. Booth addressed a number of fallen women, will furnish some idea of her breadth of view:

The address of Mrs. Booth was inimitable, pointed, evangelical, impressive, and delivered in a most earnest, sympathetic manner, bringing tears from many, and securing the closest attention from all. She identified herself with them as a fellow-sinner, showing that if they supposed her better than themselves it was a mistake, since all had sinned against God. This, she explained, was the main point, and not the particular sin of which they might be guilty. Then the Saviour was exhibited as waiting to save all alike, and the speaker urged all of them, by a variety of reasons, to immediate decision.

Finally, the consequence of neglecting or accepting the offer of mercy was set before them, and they were encouraged by the relation of the conversion of some of the most degraded characters whom Mrs. Booth and her husband had been instrumental in bringing to Christ.

We are told by Commissioner Booth-Tucker that the sight of these victims of sin and misery deeply stirred the heart of Mrs. Booth. “Not only,” he says, “did she view with compassion their unhappy condition, but her indignation knew no bounds that public opinion should wink at such cruel slavery, while professing to be shocked at the scarcely more inhuman brutality that bore the name in other lands.”

The paltriness of the efforts put forth to minimize the evil staggered her, and the gross inequality with which society meted out its punishments to the weaker sex, allowing the participators in the vice to escape with impunity, incurred her scathing denunciations.

What she saw in London greatly influenced Mrs. Booth to make the metropolis her centre, although her idea was still to work through existing religious agencies. With this end in view they moved house to Hammersmith (1865). It was not Mrs. Booth, but William Booth, who conceived the idea of going into the streets of East London, penniless and unsupported, with his message of salvation.

The anxiety and depression which had so frequently burdened the mind of William Booth during the last few years arose in no small degree from disappointment at the feeble and trifling after-effects of conversion. It will be remembered that he wrote despairful letters to his wife during the Cornish Revival; that is to say at a time when he was drawing enormous crowds to hear him preach, and when thousands of people were professing conversion. He was not dejected by the failure of his oratory; he was not inclined to doubt his mission because nobody came to hear him.

He was oppressed by what he saw in the lives of some of his converts after conversion. He thought that so great a miracle as new birth ought to culminate in as great a miracle — a new life. But these chapel people remained, so far as he could judge, very much what they were before conversion.

At any rate, they did not become missionaries; they did not make the great sacrifice; they did not touch the lives of other people with the attraction of Christ. Respectability, we must understand, did not satisfy William Booth. He wanted to change the whole world, but he scarcely succeeded in changing a few people. Converts told him that they were changed, but he himself, in too many cases, could see no alteration in their characters or their way of living. It was because his ideal was so lofty that he was thus dissatisfied; and because he was so humble that he rather blamed himself than his converts. He felt that something must be wrong in him; he doubted his vocation; he faced the idea of going to London in search of a secretaryship.

We shall see that something of the same doubt harassed his mind for several years in London. He made converts of the most degraded people and sent them to their churches and chapels; but many of them relapsed, or became formal, or did nothing to hasten the Kingdom of Heaven. It was a matter of more than ten years after his coming to London, before William Booth perceived that the one way in which he could lastingly change men and women was to make them, from the moment of their conversion, seekers and savers of the lost.

While Mrs. Booth was in London, her husband was conducting a mission in Louth, Lincolnshire, and from there he writes to her one or two characteristic letters, in which one can see that the idea of London is in his mind, although he is wholly unaware of the imminence of the change which is to transform his life. But the chief value of these letters, most of them unfortunately incomplete, is the evidence they afford of the financial situation and the difficult domestic life of these remarkable people.

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One of the letters, written just before Mrs. Booth left for London, and addressed to "My dear little disconsolate Wife," shows that she was cast down by the refusal of some church to accept her ministry. "I am sorry indeed that they have declined," he writes. "I don't like being declined anyway. I am afraid the parson is at the bottom of it. They will want you yet, I doubt not." The letter proceeds later on:

When I talk about not giving way to feeling, I don't mean hardening our hearts. I only mean the bringing our minds as far as we can in the present to our circumstances. What could I do all alone here sitting down to fret and complain? I have not a soul to whom I can talk about you. I do very largely tell everybody I meet all I can well edge in; and then again, fretting makes no better of it, so I stick to my writing and work.

You have the darling children, and are doing work for eternity with them, and the way will I trust open for us to be together again and that right early. If you get at work in London I will try and make my way there and see how I succeed. Don't say or think any hard things of me. And then again, about your poor back, what a pity to make it bad with sewing. Take care of yourself; take and practise the advice you give me.

Get ready for work. Let us try again for the glory of God. The Lord is using me here and bringing up the Church. I have been at them all the week, and the result is a great spirit of enquiry and reconsecration. Many of the people have, I believe, really and truly consecrated, and with many more there is a healthful enquiry after more of God.

In one of the letters addressed to Mrs. Booth in London occurs this interesting passage:

Mr. Shadford spoke very kindly to me after you left. They both sympathized with us very much, I believe. He reminded me all the way through of the old gentleman who met and talked to George at the Hotel there when he was running away in Uncle Tom. As we went down to the station I said, “I forgot to pay for the things I had out of the shop, but I will give it you at the station.”

“Why,” he said, “as far as that I have a £5 note in my pocket to give you at the station, and that is about how matters stand between us just now.” With a gentle exhortation to all reasonable economy, and a request twice urged that if at any time we were in any difficulty I was to write him and he would help us, he passed the bit of dirty paper to me which I received gratefully and with a proper measure of thanksgiving. . . . I shall send him a line from here and you must just write him a page.

You heard how they pitched into my writing and praised yours. There, as elsewhere, I must decrease and you increase! I enclose you two halves, and send the other two to father. Put them together and let father deposit them with the cheque at the Alliance Bank. . .
When you told me that you had nothing left, I forgot the Post Office Order. You surely did not spend that £6 as well as all the cash I left behind.

Well, I am determined to economise, and I shall write Mary to put the screw on and I am putting it on here myself. I will either stop this living at the rate of £6 a week or I will know the reason. It mortifies me beyond measure. I won’t blame you. I have very possibly spent much lately. Those forks, etc.. we could have done without. If mother proposes to pay for the spoons, let her; and she shall have that teapot. If I got her initials on it, it would look something, and please her. You might bring it about, some way or other. It won’t become our table exactly for the present.

We find him confessing to extravagance in the next letter:

I paid Miller £3:8:0 yesterday. I bought two books from him for 2/6. One by Calvin Cotton on Revivals, and a good School History of Greece for Willie and the children in turns. He has 2 vols. of Macaulay’s History of England, the 3rd and 4th. He offers them for 5/. Should I have them? I suppose not. They are good reading for a leisure hour.

Later on in the same letter we read:

I have been very poorly ever since I came home. I have had to shut out the children since breakfast. My head has been so bad; it is a little better. I went supperless to bed at 10 o’clock, in the hope of getting a refreshing night’s sleep, but was disappointed. I was awake very early, feeling dreadfully.

Then he refers to her meetings in London:

I am glad you had so good a meeting. I have no doubt about your adaptation for that sphere, or for almost any sphere, and I could never stand in your way or prohibit your labouring when . . . you could do so much good. This I settled years ago. . . . All your talk about my adaptation shows how ignorant you are of the kind of men who are now at work, specially in London, and also of my “superficiality”; but it is of no use talking on this theme! I will come to London, and once more. . .

Here, unfortunately, the sheet ends, and the rest of the letter is not to be found. The Booths moved to London in this year, and set up house in Hammersmith.
Besides the money paid to them out of the collections taken at their meetings, they were able to secure a small additional income by the sale of their pamphlets and books.

William Booth managed his wife’s pamphlets as well as his own Song Book, and in one of his letters he says of a sum of money, which is either £5 or £10, that "it is not more, nor as much by pounds, as I have received for books the last month.” It would seem that by their missions, their sale of books, and with the help of one or two well-off sympathizers, they were now earning some three or four hundred pounds a year, but precariously.

They lived with extreme simplicity. The children were dressed without any display. Mrs. Booth was one of those very capable women who can find time for household work side by side with great public activity. She was often in the kitchen, when William Booth would come to consult her, he sitting on the edges of the table, while she, with her hands covered in dough, went on with her cake making. In more than one of her letters to her mother she begs Mrs. Mumford, who was an industrious needlewoman, not to send fine clothes for the children. For example:

Accept my warmest thanks for the little frock you sent. We like it very much. There is only one difficulty, namely, it is too smart! I shall have to give you full and explicit directions in future as to the style, trimming, etc., for we really must set an example in this respect worthy of imitation. I feel no temptation now to decorate myself. But I cannot say the same about my children. And yet, oh, I see I must be decided, and come out from among the fashion-worshipping, worldly professors around me. Lord, help me!

Not only did Mrs. Booth manage her house with great thoroughness, but, in order to meet their heavier expenses in London, she took in first one lodger, and afterwards, in moving into a larger and more convenient house, two. It is almost incredible that a woman so weak and delicate, so often exposed to serious physical collapse, and so frequently engaged in a most exhausting form of public work, should have found time to superintend the education of her children, to practise a careful domestic economy, and to look after the needs of a large household including a couple of lodgers. But Mr. Bramwell Booth, who perfectly remembers this time, assures me that his mother did all these things, and did them well.

Chapter 21

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