THE QUESTION OF HOLY COMMUNION

AMONG the few people of gentle birth, who from the first welcomed the Salvation Army, was Lady Henry Somerset. She was attracted by the Army because it provided a real reason for rigorous self-abnegation, and because it presented a real opportunity for a life of devotion.

She tells me that she went to General Booth with a desire to surrender and live her life in the obscurest work of the Salvation Army, and with only one possible objection in her mind. The General had more or less banned the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Lady Henry was willing to join the Army; one may say she was eager to become a Soldier; but she could not give up the rite, which for her was the central rite, of the Christian religion.

She asked General Booth if she might be allowed to go for Holy Communion to the Church of England. The -answer was a negative.

Now, this question of the Eucharist is one which conveniently explains at once the success and the limitations of William Booth. If we study his attitude towards this rite, which had been from the time of the Apostles (with many borrowings from pagan ritual) the centre of Christian worship, we shall see how he drew so large a multitude to his side, and how he alienated the sympathies of a multitude, if not so large, at least of finer sensibilities.

Lady Henry Somerset said to me one day in 1913:
“Whenever I hear the Salvation Army criticised, and whenever I myself am inclined to judge it from a theological point of view, I remind myself of the solitary Soldier in the slums of East London, in the slums of every great city in the world, who lives on next to nothing, who seeks the eternal welfare of souls, and who does everything for love.

Always remember that William Booth inspired that. I regard him as the true St. Francis of the modern world, the true St. Francis of our industrial civilization. He shook England by his wonderful book on poverty. He was the first man to hold up to the Church, and make her face them as they really are, the unhappy miseries of the poor.

That was a great work, and only a great man, an inspired man, could have accomplished it. I tell you what I am inclined to say about him, after years of reflection. I think that he saw God, saw Him quite clearly, but through vulgar eyes. I do not mean social vulgarity, of course. I do not mean anything banale and snobbish by that term. I mean that his spiritual vision was always coloured by the coarseness and the hardness of his early training.

He saw God clearer than almost any man of his generation, but with the eyes of a provincial who had suffered hardships. And when his spiritual life deepened, as it certainly did deepen, he had become so possessed by his huge task of world-wide social reform, that he really had not a single moment in which to acquaint himself with the spirit of the Church. I am quite sure that he really never came to know Anglican Christianity.”

This is the judgment of a shrewd and refined observer. It is true in some respects, and in those respects profoundly true; but it misses one important consideration. William Booth faced the Catholic question of the Sacrament, and made a deliberate choice.

Whether he was right or wrong, he deliberately rejected the Sacrament; but it was not until he had studied the matter with care and with anxiety, not until he had weighed with a grave deliberation all the consequences of that rejection.

Because he decided to do without the Sacraments of Catholic Christianity, it must not be supposed that he brushed those sacred rites impatiently, brusquely, and scandalously aside. There was nothing blatant, rash, or iconoclastic about that rejection. He did not make a mock of these holy things, so infinitely precious to thousands of Christians.

For years he considered the subject; indeed, had it not been for the influence of some of his followers, particularly Railton, it is possible that he might have retained the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. To his life’s end, certainly for many long years after his decision, he was occasionally disturbed as to its wisdom.

We must see on what grounds William Booth based his disregard of the Eucharist. These grounds were at once practical and theological. To begin with, the people who crowded to his celebration of the rite were in numerous instances men and women just snatched from the destruction of alcoholism, to whom the very taste, the mere odour, of wine was a danger.

Then, when he had done away with fermented wines and employed only coloured water in the rite, the scenes were sometimes so tumultuous, even so hilarious — for his earliest converts were the roughest and wildest elements in society, the multitude neglected at that time by the Churches — that he was shocked and offended.

To William Booth, born an Anglican and trained as a Methodist, there was always an element, a suggestion of mystery and beauty in his thoughts about the Lord’s Supper. Until the age of fifty it was impossible for him to be rid of this heredity. He had never perhaps felt towards that Sacrament any feeling comparable with those of a devout Catholic, but unquestionably he had regarded this rite from his boyhood upward with reverence and honour; it stood for him as a part of Christian worship.

But when in the social difficulties of his Whitechapel circumstances he came to decide about this matter, he had at his side young men in whose minds was no inhibiting heredity and whose impatience with anything in the nature of priestcraft, magic, or sacerdotalism was akin to passion. They were reformers who refused to be hindered by authority; progressives, with little but disdain for traditionalism, evangelists, who loathed only next to sin the paralysing touch of the formalist.

For George Railton, in particular, there was only one baptism — the baptism of the Holy Ghost; only one communion with Christ — the communion of a cleansed heart devoted to His service. His influence was flung on the side of rejection; and William Booth, who leaned in matters of organization far more upon his young men than upon his wife, finally decided to give up the Sacraments.

In a draft drawn up in 1881 by George Railton for the consideration of General Booth and his Chief of the Staff, Bramwell Booth, the arguments for abandonment are set forth with a speciousness and a plausibility which are more curious than persuasive. We shall not trouble the reader with the subtlety of this document, but where it is emphatic and declares the mind of William Booth as he came at last to make it up, we shall incorporate it with the following statement.

The ultimate decision of William Booth was reached on the one unassailable ground that his business with suffering and sinful humanity was the stern and difficult business of redemption. “There must be no baptismal service that can delude any one into a vain hope of getting to Heaven without being ‘born again.’

There must be no Lord’s Supper ‘administered’ by anybody in such a way as to show anything like a priestly superiority of one over another — every saved person being ‘a priest unto God.’” He came to suspect symbolism, and to dislike the very sound of the word Sacrament.

He believed that men are only too ready to adopt excuses for idleness in the spiritual sphere; that self-analysis is put upon one side by a great majority of those who lean upon Institutionalism; that the life of absolute self-sacrifice and entire dependence upon God is hindered by a formalism which appears to set a priest between God and the soul.

“There must never be a sacramental service at the end of a meeting so as to prevent the possibility of inviting sinners to the mercy-seat.” Such communion services as he permitted at the time (1881) —services of a family character — were to be “at once followed by an open-air demonstration, so that the life and death pledge may be acted upon immediately.”

Enough has been said to make it quite clear that William Booth would horrify a number of Christians by his decision in this matter; but perhaps enough has also been said to show how this same decision would appeal to the multitude who hunger and thirst for personal experience in religion.

If the Salvation Army offended the orthodox, it kindled the enthusiasm of the unorthodox. If the orthodox saw in William Booth a heretic, the unorthodox hailed him as one who spoke with authority, and not as the Scribes and Pharisees. He had for the religious world some such divided force as marked the message of Carlyle in letters. Carlyle, of whom Bagehot said, “He has contradicted the floating paganism, but he has not founded the deep religion,” troubled the distinguishing mind of the philosopher and horrified the mind steeped in Greek culture; but he filled with a wild earnestness the middle classes and the democracy.

William Booth had to choose between the patronage of the orthodox and the love and devotion of the unorthodox; that is to say, he was to choose between saving two or three and saving a multitude. Just as Carlyle to the young men of the middle classes appeared to be a prophet raised up by God and Goethe, for the moral resurrection of England, so to depressed multitudes of this country, William Booth by his rejection of orthodox conformity and by his unsparing insistence on the need of a changed will, a cleansed heart, and a new spirit, appeared to be the authentic voice of God.

Here was a man bold enough to preach the nothingness of this world, the vanity of riches and honour, the folly of ambition and greed, the absolute dead unprofitableness of gaining the whole world; and this thunderous preacher proclaimed the equality of every man in the sight of God, declared that no pagan beauty, no mystic rite, no tender symbolism from the poet of superstition could set a soul right in the eyes of the Almighty Judge, commanded all those whose wills were surrendered and whose hearts were cleansed, to go feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and sell all they had and give to the poor.

This was a religion that the multitude could understand. William Booth, in the opinion of some, would have cut but a poor and needy figure in a roomful of orthodox theologians; let us reflect, however, that orthodox theologians would have cut figures as poor and needy in the slums of Whitechapel.

The subtleties of theology, the brilliant casuistry of the schools, the marvellous adaptations of the religious conscience to every fresh destruction of science and criticism — these things are, of necessity, a maze of words, a folly of language, to the man in the dark places of civilization. Yet to the most sunken and depressed of the human race, so great a miracle as conversion seems a reasonable and a truthful condition of religion.

To the most sunken and depressed of mankind, the possibility of an immense inward change is no absurdity and no delusion. William Booth made a demand which the most erudite of theologians would have trembled to make, and he addressed that demand, without compromise or equivocation of any kind, to the most unhappy and the most obstinate and the most sinful of the human race.

It will be seen, then, that in first relegating the Sacraments to an unimportant position, and then definitely abandoning their observance, the real object of William Booth was to lay every emphasis in his power on the central necessity of conversion. This central necessity was the heart and soul of his teaching; it was the doctrine which he held from first to last, which he never questioned, and which he never modified; there could be no salvation for sinful man without a new birth.

Top

But rightfully to understand the position of William Booth it must be carefully remembered that he was helped to this relinquishment of the Sacrament by the two young men who most ardently supported his crusade.

He was influenced by Bramwell Booth and by George Railton to abandon the rite; he came to the conclusion that these men had formed a true judgment; he flung himself more heartily than ever into the work of a preacher who sees the beginning of real religion in the changed heart of the sinner, but, nevertheless, to the end of his days there were moments when he looked almost wistfully to the Sacrament of the Supper, and there were moments when he appears to have doubted, if only transiently, the wisdom of his decision.

It is an interesting fact that among the Anglicans who showed a kindly attitude towards William Booth in the early ‘eighties, were the greatest of her scholars, the most picturesque, if not the extremest, of her High Churchmen, and, in the person of Canon Liddon, the most eloquent of her preachers. Dr. Westcott and Dr. Lightfoot had words of encouragement for the Salvation Army; Dr. Benson, then Bishop of Truro, and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, took pains to establish a friendly understanding with William Booth.

The two men met, and corresponded with each other. Dr. Benson was impressed by General Booth’s personality, and sought earnestly to gain from him a concession on this particular question of the Eucharist. The following letters will show the reader that while William Booth had expressed admiration for the Anglican Church, Dr. Benson applauded his decision not to celebrate the Sacraments. The concession which Dr. Benson sought to gain from General Booth was not granted, and in 1889 a correspondence took place on the same subject with a like result.

The Bishop of Truro to General Booth.
LOLLARD’S TOWER, LAMBETH PALACE,
May 24, 1882
MY DEAR SIR — I should consider it a great favour if I might be allowed the opportunity of some conversation with you on practical subjects of religious work.

Dr. Westcott, Regius Professor of Divinity, at Cambridge, is also anxious to be allowed to hear your experience in such important matters.

May I venture to name twelve o’clock to-morrow as an hour at which we could call, with your kind permission, in Victoria Street.

I need scarcely express to you the interest with which your work in Cornwall inspires me.— Yours very faithfully,

E. W. TRURON.
The Bishop of Truro to General Booth.
June 26, 1882.
MV DEAR SIR — I sincerely thank you for the very kind and friendly letter which I received from you on the subject of our conversation (for which I owe.you most sincere thanks), and of the further considerations which have suggested themselves to you.

I have to thank you also for the account of the service which the Bishop of Bedford held with your people a service of which I read the report with intense interest and satisfaction.

I need not assure you that I watch so large and special a work with anxious solicitude as well as interest. God has indeed in a marvellous way placed a multitude of souls under your influence, and I pray often for your own spiritual peace, and that all may issue to God’s growing glory among the masses.

It is indeed patent that an Army is not a whole Kingdom —that soldiers have citizens for their object and care—and that the building up of themselves as citizens is a duty which it is not safe for them to forget.
Nevertheless the state of Society is in many ways abnormal. In many districts the lowest classes have fallen into a condition resulting from many combined causes of neglect, and the devising of Christian remedies for that condition has exercised and severely tasked the energies of the most devoted Sons of the Church.

However anxious, therefore, about different methods, the Church cannot but be thankful — even if it rejoices with trembling — to see your work avowedly based on principles which to so great an extent accord with her own first principles —thorough repentance — personal faith in a personal Saviour —holiness of life.

She herself has received through the Bible this system for the building up and building together of mankind, which recognises for this life, the power of the Sacraments of Christ; and she vividly experiences that power. It is for her impossible to feel that what I have called citizenship can be complete without them.

At the same time, I am able to understand how the call you have to make to the dechristianised and degraded may be conducted by you without express teaching on those Institutions, and rejoice that you so firmly hold that it is no business or part of your own system to administer them. Here is to be recognised an immense difference between the Salvation Army and the sects which have adopted an imitation of the Sacramental system.

One thing I do look to with great anxiety — namely, that the Church people who follow with you — or others who, following with you, may desire to communicate in Church, should not be debarred by compulsory arrangements of your own from the partaking of the Communion with their brethren. This is surely not unreasonable, and applies also to those who belong to any Christian body, and is as reasonable for them as for us.

It is not that you should admit within your borders the celebration of sacraments, not that you should make positive arrangements for the communicating of your people, but that counter arrangements should not be made which would render their life of communion impossible.

In writing this, I can, of course, speak only as an individual. But I am sure you know that our intercourse is not “of guile,” but “in simplicity of godly sincerity.”— There is no worldly desire that “ we should reap where we have not sown “ or “stretch ourselves into another man’s boundary.”

I desire to appreciate and recognise what God works by you in those difficult regions of life. And you have assured me how much you value our working for the “edification of the Body of Christ.”

May all who have received a gift from the Lord, by prayer and sympathy and fellow-working, help on each the other’s grace; so that we may severally render in our account with joy for our service to Christ in His Body and His Spouse._ Believe me, my dear Sir, Your faithful servant in the Lord,
E. W. TRURON.

The decision of General Booth not to grant the concession suggested to him in so warm and kindly a spirit by Dr. Benson was arrived at, as we have said, after considerable discussion with Catherine Booth and Bramwell Booth and Railton. It was not so unreasonable as it may seem at the first glance.

William Booth was not animated by the least feeling of animosity or antagonism to the Church of England; he was not even swayed, so far as I can discover, by the fear of any “Romanizing” influence. He reached his decision on the very logical ground of the Salvation Army’s essential unity.

To grant the concession would have been to admit an incompletion, a fragmentary character, in the message of the Salvation Army. He could not allow his converts to go to the Church for Holy Communion without making the destructive admission that the Salvation Army lacked an essential of salvation. His stand was definitely upon the central rock of conversion. Conversion was the unum necessarium, and after conversion there was nothing but a life of unselfish devotion.

Of all the many movements in the mind of this strange and troubled man, none strikes us so sharply and so illuminatingly as the movement towards this definite and binding rule — a rule made with an iron rigidity on the surface, made with an uncompromising forcefulness in public, but accompanied in the depths of his consciousness by an occasional disturbance and disquiet of uncertainty.

In an interview with Sir Henry Lunn, published in I895, William Booth made the following statement on the question of the Sacraments:

“In the first place, we do not consider that the Sacraments are essentials of salvation, and in this matter, as I know quite well, I have with me some of the most eminent members of the English Episcopal bench, who have admitted to me, in conversation, that they would never dare to say that a man who had not been baptized, and not received the Lord’s Supper. could not enter Heaven. We hold that, through our Lord Jesus Christ, Faith, Hope, and Charity, with or without any formula or ceremonies, will carry a man into Heaven.

“Secondly. With reference to the question as to our Lord’s intention to institute these as permanent ceremonies in the Church, we reply that there are other ordinances that are apparently commands of a similar character which the Church has universally agreed in not observing.

The most striking example of that is the command to wash one another’s feet. In the thirteenth chapter of St. John our Lord says, ‘I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you. If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, ye should also wash one another’s feet.’

We stand in relation to the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper where the whole Church stands to-day in relation to many customs which were prevalent in the Apostolic days.

“Thirdly. We came into this position originally by determining not to be a Church. We did not wish to undertake the administration of the Sacraments, and thereby bring ourselves into collision with existing Churches.

“Fourthly. We were further driven to take up our present position by clergymen of the Church of England refusing to administer the rite to our Soldiers because they had not gone through the form of Confirmation. This created difficulties which seemed to me only to be solved by the declaration of my own conviction that these Sacraments were not essential to salvation.

“Fifthly. We have found the existing notions with reference to these ordinances seriously interfering with the inculcation of right views of penitence and holy living. Men and women are constantly in danger of putting their trust in ordinances, and thinking that baptized communicants must be in a secure position, no matter how inconsistently they are living.

This leads us to say that as circumcision is nothing, so baptism is nothing—but the keeping the commandment of God. We attach great importance to that wonderful statement of John the Baptist, ‘I indeed baptize you with water. . . but He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.

“ Sixthly. Moreover, I should like to emphasize the F act that this with us is not a settled question. We never declaim against the Sacraments: we never even state our own position. We are anxious not to destroy the confidence of Christian people in institutions which are helpful to them.”

“Do you substitute anything,” I asked the General, “for the Sacraments?”

“Only so far,” he said, “as to urge our Soldiers in every meal they take to remember, as they break the bread, the broken body of our Lord, and as they drink the cup, His shed blood; and every time they wash the body to remember that the soul can only be cleansed by the purifying Blood of Christ.”

“Your discipline is so very strong, General, that I should like to ask one or two other questions on this point. Would you be willing to sanction your Soldiers being baptized and partaking of the Lord’s Supper if they desired?”

To this the General gave an unqualified answer in the affirmative.

Chapter 29

Contents