BEGINNINGS OF THE NEW LIFE
AND THE FIRST SERMON EVER PREACHED BY WILLIAM BOOTH

“DIRECTLY after I was converted I had a bad attack of fever. I was brought down to the edge of the River.”

This emphatic statement, occurring abruptly in the disjecta membra of autobiography, might lead the reader to suppose that conversion had been approached in a morbid and unhealthy manner, that the great submission had been made in a feverish or hysterical frame of mind.

But, fortunately for the truth, the statement is typical of William Booth’s indifference to chronology. The attack of fever did not come till nearly two years after his conversion, when he was seventeen years of age, and at the threshold of his extraordinary career. Conversion was followed, unfortunately for our present purpose, by about two years of autobiographical silence.

Three things alone are known with any degree of definiteness concerning these important years. We know that the chief friendship of his youth was deepened by his new religious experience; we know that the humanitarian instinct manifested itself in at least one act of touching kindness; and we know that romance for the first time knocked at the heart of this young voyager, whose chart was not yet marked for boundless adventures of quite other kind.

‘When the friendship of William Booth and William Sansom began is not clearly known, but it was probably as early as the days of Nottintone Place, where the two boys would have been close neighbours. Will Sansom, as he is affectionately called, was the son of a well-to-do lace manufacturer. His social circumstances were superior to William Booth’s, his prospects altogether of a more enviable nature.

Yet from very early days, just as Ann Booth was the chosen friend of Sarah Butler, so William Booth was the chosen friend of this fortunate young man; and in both cases, it is worthy of noticing, the friendship persisted when the Booths were reduced from a proud poverty to a staring and emphatic penury. Something there must have been in these Booths very attractive and admirable.

I asked Mrs. Osborne, the Sarah Butler of those days, if William Booth was at all violent in the first enthusiasm of his preaching. “Not in the least,” she replied; adding, “if he had been, Will Sansorn would have curbed him.” This answer not only exhibits Sansom as a refined and gentle nature; it shows that he exercised a decided influence over William Booth.

Will Sansom is described as a very handsome young man, romantic-looking, and marked from boyhood by the intense and dreadful signs of consumption. He was one of those whom Maeterlinck calls the Pre-destined. “The men among whom they dwell become the better for the knowledge of them, and the sadder, and the more gentle.”

He was of the company “who look at us with an eager smile, and seem to be on the point of confessing that they know all; and then, towards their twentieth year, they leave us, hurriedly, muffling their footsteps, as though they had just discovered that they had chosen the wrong dwelling-place, and had been about to pass their lives among men whom they did not know.” In this case the youth was profoundly religious.

He had the deep absorbing faith of a Gratray, the fervour of a Pascal, the hastening evangelical eagerness of a Wesley. The nearer he approached his youthful death the more passionately did he seek to spread his knowledge of the truth. But always he was refined in manner, persuasive in method, winning and ingratiating by nature.

“We were like David and Jonathan,” says William Booth; and Mrs. Osborne described to me how these two young men were always together, how they walked about arm-in-arm, how they both had the same stoop, the same pallor, the same brightness of the eyes. The friendship was noticed by other people.

The young men were regarded by their circle as “ bosom friends.” It is not often in biography that such a friendship as this is recorded, the deep and affectionate friendship of a young man prosperous and well-stationed with the apprenticed shop-assistant. Religion had much to do with it, but the first cause appears to have been the commanding character and extraordinary attraction of Wilful Will.

Some time after William Booth’s conversion, these two youths were attracted by the friendless condition of a poor old withered beggar-woman who shuffled about the streets in horrid rags, endured the mockery of street boys, suffered the persecution of Nottingham “lambs,” and slept in doorways or under hedges — a grotesque parody of womanhood.

William Booth must have seen her a hundred times before his conversion, for she was a character of the streets; but it was not until after his conversion that her deplorable destitution, the infinite pity of her forlorn and friendless state, appealed to this compassion. He determined to rescue her from this state, and consulted Will Sansom as to the best way of ensuring her welfare. Then they went about among their friends, collected money, took a little cabin, furnished it, and installed the old woman within, making provision for her support.

The most wretched creature, the most ridiculed and neglected of all Nottingham’s miserables had moved the heart of William Booth to compassion, and upon such an one as this he made his first experiment in social work.

During this period in his life he imagined that his earthly happiness was bound up with the life of a girl into whose society he had been thrown for some years. She was the daughter of the old couple who had first introduced him to Methodism, the old people who loved him because he resembled their dead son.

For a number of months William Booth walked about the world believing that he was in love. He probably discussed the matter with Will Sansom. He was elated by the discovery, and cherished the thought of this wonderful passion at his heart with a fervour of sentimentalism.

The young lady sang well, and William Booth, who then could not sing himself, loved music very keenly. It was a great pleasure for him to sit and listen to the singing of this pretty girl, who was a little older than himself.

But before many amorous moons had waned, the young zealot made another discovery, as startling and much more liberating than the first. He discovered that he did not love this person at all, that she was not his inamorata, and certainly should never he his wife. It was a case of “calf-love,” he says, and laughs it out of his memory. His only obsession was religion.

He does not seem to have suffered at this period from any healthy or unhealthy disquiet of soul. His disposition was too headlong and impulsive, his anxieties too outward and unselfish for moonings within the depths of his own consciousness. He was no mystic, and he was no prig; but he suffered, some men may say suffered all his life, from what Arnold called Hebraism.

God was the supreme concernment of his life. Everything else brought into relation with this immense interest dwindled to insignificance. He had something of Carlyle’s contempt for Art. Science had no vital attraction for him. The sports and amusements of mankind filled him with contemptuous impatience. So tremendous was his sense of God that he never questioned it, rarely scrutinized it, refusing to paralyze his devotion and his senses by a moment’s incredulity concerning this subjective conception of the Infinite. He had one thought, to live absolutely in accordance with God’s will.

In the year 1846, when he was seventeen, came the attack of fever which brought him “to the edge of the River.” He had outgrown his calf-love, he was deep in the friendship of Will Sansom, he was still keen about succeeding in business, above all other things earnest in religion.

The visit of James Caughey, of whom a description is given in the first chapter, occurred at this time. William Booth caught fire from the flame of this revivalist’s oratory. He was deeply and pervasively influenced by the uncompromising realism of the American preacher. It may have been that his attack of fever was in some measure due to the excitement occasioned throughout Nottingham by this missionary.

He went to all the services he could attend, he joined in the singing of some of Charles Wesley’s triumphant battle-songs, he witnessed scenes of conversion which were extraordinarily exciting, and he saw in the lives of many of his neighbours the veritable miracle of new birth. Here, at last, was religion in action, the real and living religion of his dreams. He gave himself lip to it, thought scarce anything else, and presently was laid by with a raging fever.

While he tossed on his bed, over the dim, struggling, and shabby shop in which Widow Booth sold tape and cotton, a message was brought to him from Will Sansom —a message which very probably saved his life. Sansom sent word to him that he was starting an open-air mission in the slums of Nottingham. and bade him get well quickly and come and help him. Here was medicine and vocation in one! The message rallied the spirit of the sick youth; it was like a trumpet-call to his drooping soul; and he rose from his bed as soon as he had strength to stand, and went back to his work and out, for the first time, to religious activity.

More memorable in his life than 1844 was this year of grace 1846; and, fortunately, it is from this point that the stream of biography begins to flow with strength and certainty. If his souvenirs d’enfance are misted with a Lethean miasma, if his memories of boyhood are little more than a concordia discors, from his seventeenth year onward we possess almost every detail and every fact, almost every lineament and every expression, almost every thought and shade of feeling, for the composition of a faithful portrait.

The life of the man begins from 1846; and it was a life lived so frankly and honestly, so far away from the morbid centre of self-introspection, so completely at that uttermost circumference of being where self is consumed in a passionate care for others, that one can be sure of a veritable likeness. No man ever lived who kept back less of himself from the gaze of the world, or who gave more of himself to the service of humanity.

Will Sansom had not long to wait for an answer to his message. “No sooner was I able to get about than I gladly joined him.” But William Booth, the leader of everything, was shy and self-conscious of speaking in the open, or of speaking at all in public. He joined in the services, but would neither preach nor pray.

Will Sansom sang, prayed, and preached. He was helped by a friend named Samuel Hovey, by Sarah Butler, and by one of her sisters who sang beautifully. William Booth contented himself with standing in the group, with singing in the hymns, with exclaiming Amen in the prayers, and with speaking privately to those who surrounded the company.

But the influence of David Greenbury effected a change. This evangelist from Scarborough, of whom mention has been made in the opening chapter, was the first man to realize the force and power of William Booth as a preacher.

He was struck by Booth’s earnestness, by the vigour of his personality, and by his remarkable appearance and emphatic manner. He urged upon the young man that it was his duty to speak, that he owed it to God to conquer his timidity, which was a form of selfishness. One of Booth’s favourite hymns came to his assistance. He was haunted by the verse —

And can I yet delay
My little all to give?
To tear my soul from earth away
For Jesus to receive?
Nay, but I yield, I yield!
I can hold out no more;
I sink, by dying love compelled,
And own Thee conqueror.

With the same sudden abandon that had characterized his surrender two years before to the urgence of conscience, he now not only threw himself into the work of street preaching, but became the recognized leader of the group.

“The Meetings we held,” he says, “were very remarkable for those days. We used to take out a chair into the street, and one of us mounting it would give out a hymn, which we then sang with the help of, at the most, three or four people. Then I would talk to the people, and invite them to come with us to a Meeting in one of the houses.”

Of Will Sansom he says, “He had a fine appearance, was a beautiful singer, and possessed a wonderful gift in prayer. After I had spoken in our Open-Air Meeting he would kneel down and wrestle with God until it seemed as though he would move the very stones on which he knelt, as well as the hearts of the people who heard him.”

At this period in his life there was nothing of that humorous spirit which characterized so much of his later work. Sarah Butler says that his nature was rather “morose and melancholy.” He was “tremendously in earnest.”

There is still living in Nottingham a very old woman who knew the Booths in Sneinton, and remembers the first sermon preached by William Booth. She gave me an account of that sermon, and described the meetings in the cottages, her dim eyes shining with pleasure through their thick spectacles, her face illuminated by a deep joy.

“The first sermon he ever preached,” she said, “was in Kid Street. I remember it very well. The Meeting was held in a small cottage. It was at eight o’clock at night, and he had come straight from his work. There was a box placed upside down on the table for a desk, with two candles burning, one each side of the Bible.

The door stood open, and poor women came into the tiny parlour, bringing their own chairs with them. In the doorway was a group of men, afraid to come in lest they should be converted, but interested in this new way of preaching religion. They filled up the doorway, a dark little crowd that extended into the street. Will Booth’s sermon — ah, how well I remember it! — was very gentle and tender, quite different from anything else I ever heard him say to the people, and so strange for a young man to preach that it almost made some of the women smile.

He talked of little children learning to walk. He described how they toddled, and swayed, and came near to falling. He said how difficult a thing it was for little babes to learn the use of their legs, to trust their tiny feet, and to advance with courage.

And then he asked if any mother, watching her child’s first efforts to walk, would be cross with the infant’s failure, would shout at it when it swayed, would sit still, unmoved, when it fell and hurt itself. Then he said that it was just as difficult to live a true Christian life, and that we should always be on the look-out for helping people, especially those who were only just beginning to live that life.

He said it was wrong to judge them when they failed, and just as wrong to sit idle when they fell. We should run, and lift them up, and help them. Hard words would not help them; sitting still would not help them; we must go and do something to make it less hard for them to walk straight.”

She told me, too, that she heard one of his earliest preachings in the open street. The scene was Red Lion Square, and he was surrounded by a crowd of poor people.

That was a very different sermon! “ she exclaimed. “He called out in his great vojce that all the suffering and sorrow of the world came from sin. I remember how he said, ‘Friends, I want to put a few straight questions to your souls. Have any of you got a child at home without shoes to its little feet? Are your wives sitting now in dark houses waiting for you to return, without money?

Are you going away from here to the public-house to spend on drink money that your wives need for food and your children for shoes?’ It was all like that. And then he read out the Wesleyan hymn which has the verse:

Misers! for you His life He paid;
Your basest crime He bore:
Drunkards! your sins on Him were laid
That you might sin no more.

I think there had never been such preaching in the open streets before. One of his other favourite hymns had the verse:

Outcasts of men, to you I call,
Harlots and publicans and thieves!
He spreads His arm to embrace you all;
Sinners alone His grace receives:
No need of Him the righteous have,
He came the lost to seek and save.

I remember, too, how he was insulted, and how calmly he bore it. Once, while he was preaching in Pump Street, a man who had stopped to listen suddenly shouted out, shaking his fist at the preacher, ‘You liar! you liar!’ And Will Booth just looked at him, and said in a very soft, kindly voice, ‘Friend, it was for you He died; stop, and be saved.’ He was always like that.”

There is another old body living in Nottingham who remembers those early days, a very rigid, ultra-respectable, demure, and eloquent spinster. Her brother was one of William Booth’s earliest friends, one of the first to join the little group of street preachers.

She spoke throughout our conversation with emphatic gravity, very plainly conscious of her importance, and maintaining an aspect of preternatural solemnity. “To begin with,” she said, “Billy was rather forward.” So far as my researches go, this old lady is the only person in the whole world who ever referred to William Booth as “Billy.”

He was sometimes called by his father in childhood “Bill,” and among his associates he was known as “Will”; but no one else that I can find trace of ever ventured to speak of him with the extreme familiarity of “Billy.” The lady seemed to use this name with a relish, as though it increased the prestige of her venerable position and diminished the world-wide fame of the great evangelist to a humility relatively suitable.

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“You must not misunderstand me,” she said; “he was not overbearing; he was not violent; he was not what you would call domineering; but he was forward, distinctly forward. Yes, he was a forward lad. You could never have kept him down. You could never have held him back. He was bound to push forward and take the lead in everything.”

“Can you describe him to me?” I asked.

“Describe him? Who? Billy? Oh, yes. Well, he was what you would call nice-looking. I shouldn’t say he was handsome. At any rate he was not so handsome as you, not nearly.”

I protested — as well I might.

“He was too pale to be handsome,” she continued critically, ignoring the protest. “He was not so handsome as you, but his legs were longer. I should describe him as a nice-looking lad. He was tall, yes, decidedly tall, and thin; remarkably so. He was clean-shaven in those days; he wore his hair long, it was the fashion then, and his hair was as black as coal; he had a stoop in his shoulders, and looked as if he had outgrown himself. I should say that he was perhaps something more than nice-looking.

I should call him strange-looking, romantic-looking. If you saw him once you would never forget him. Of course his nose was very striking-looking. We always called that ‘the Wellington.’ A strange face, very; so pale, so white, and with all that black hair, and those piercing eyes — yes, a romantic face — decidedly so.”
Her insistence upon the romantic character of his appearance prompted me to ask a question to which I had long been anxious to get an answer.

I began by asking if he had been surrounded from the first days of his preaching by a number of young ladies.
“Well, it began with one or two,” replied the demure spinster, “but the number increased.”

“Now, I wonder if you can tell me,” said I, as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted, “whether there is any truth in the story that he was in love with one of those young ladies?”

As though I had made a most scandalous suggestion, the venerable lady straightened her back, regarded me coldly, and replied with a trenchant scorn, “As for that, I will only say, speaking from a long experience of life, that the number of young ladies who imagine that every young man they meet is in love with them is only equalled by the number of young men who go about the world fancying that every young lady that looks their way is in love with them. It is a pity it should be so, but so it is.

As for Will Booth, I never heard that he was in love with anybody, though there was some talk that he might make a match of it one day with a very sweet young lady who sang at his meetings. But I should be at a standstill, my dear sir, I really should, if I was to try and tell you the number of young ladies who were in love with him. He was a favourite. He was worshipped, as you may say. And I think he was certainly a very romantic-looking, attractive, and interesting young man.”

The “very sweet young lady who sang at his meetings” was a sister of Sarah Butler, and although no mention is made of her in William Booth’s autobiographical notes, it is probable that he did look upon this follower with a somewhat more particular and personal interest than the others. It is certain that he never spoke to her except about religion; it is certain that he did not in any way “keep company” with her; but in one way or the other his followers came to regard it as a possibility that William Booth and the sweet singer might some day make a match of it; while, many years after, when as a very old man he was reminded of this young lady, and told of the expectation which existed among the others, he smiled and made answer, “Ah, I remember there was such a person!”

It seems that after they had conducted their open-air meetings and finished their preachings in the cottages, this body of young enthusiasts would sometimes go for a walk before returning to their homes. But there was never, I am told, any mingling of the sexes on these occasions. “The men always walked together in front, and we would follow behind,” says Sarah Butler.

Conversation was about religion. Schemes for spreading Christianity were discussed. Particular sinners were marked down for personal appeals and private prayer.

“I remember, however,” Sarah Butler told me, “one of those walks when we more or less travelled together, and conversation turned upon other things beside religion. Some one proposed that we should go and look at the new railway line that was being laid at Colwick. It was a wonderfully quiet night. The moon was shining. And it was summer-time. Well, we were very happy and elated. We loved the stillness, the fields, the woods, and the moonlight. We sang as we walked. We rejoiced in our happiness.

And I think William Booth did walk with my sister for a little time, but I can’t he certain. However, nothing came of the walk, or of any other meeting. I used to think they were in love with each other, but I see now it was only a fancy. William Booth had no other thought in his mind at that time than preaching to the people and saving sinners from their sin.

He was the most earnest and enthusiastic man I ever knew — he was really burning, really on fire, to save souls. He used to say that we were saved to save. He could not stand people who said their souls were saved and who did nothing to save other people. If lie thought of my sister at all, it was only a passing thought. No one could make a romance out of it. I assure you he was too much in earnest about this street-preaching to think of falling in love.”

We see this group of young people, preaching and praying in the streets, holding their little services in cottages, going for walks in sexual separation, whether with moon shining or not shining, meeting in chapel on Saturday, attending classes, discussing sermons and gossip of chapel life — a group of earnest young lives conscious of God, conscious of God’s demand upon them, and preoccupied with business of the next world — a strange and lonely group in Nottingham, making no great stir there, incurring some local ridicule, and occasioning some distinct alarm and misgiving in the straight minds of rigid chapel orthodoxy.

It would seem that the great humanitarian spirit of the Christian religion had not yet developed in the soul of William Booth. He was a member of the Church, he attended the services of that Church, and his labours were directed to preaching his gospel of salvation in order to save people from hell and bring them into membership with his Church.

The Chartist was dead in him. The Methodist was very much alive. Years were to pass before he broke free from sectarianism, before he reached Christianity as a spirit that could not be bound, and before he perceived the concurrent necessity of social betterment with spiritual welfare.

In the lives of few religious leaders is growth more evident. He was haunted now and again, as we shall see, by dogmas and theological practices which had once formed part of his religious life, but he was never deeply perturbed by these old clothes of his youth, and in his normal moods he was conscious of no need for any theology in his service to the world but that which led men to the heart of Christ.

He grew wonderfully, he developed amazingly, and at the end, though a certain hard and rigorous strain endured, his spirit was one of the sweetest, tenderest, most tolerant and gentle that ever longed for spiritual perfection.

He was asked, when he was an old man, by a friend of his youth if he still insisted upon some particular doctrine of his youth. The answer is a key to the man’s soul. Tapping his friend impatiently on the breast with the back of his hand, he said, “Look here, when a fellow speaks to us like that we tell him to go and do something.”

This may have been uttered only as the expression of a mood, for he held this doctrine himself, but such utterance shows that his emphasis was upon service, not upon speculation.

But it was years before he could give such a great and splendid answer, an answer so robust with the health of true and manful religion. He himself had to grow to that answer. For years he was interested in such speculations, for years he was plagued by theology, for years he was blind to the natural and shameful causes of human misery; but, although to the end of his days he believed in such a doctrine as that of Entire Sanctification, and although he never tore up the documents of abstract theology, he certainly grew more and more impatient of egoistic introspection, more and more insistent upon work for God.

Nevertheless, even at this epoch in his life, there are signs of the wonders that were yet to be. One catches glimmerings of an original mind, flashes of a spirit that could revolt passionately from orthodoxy, and sparks of a soul that well might burst into flame for the salvation of unhappy people.

The respectable citizens who attended Wesley Chapel —good, solid Christians of the commercial variety, the gentlemen in broadcloth, and the ladies in bombazine, or some other notable material of the period guaranteeing moral value and financial stability — these goodly and satisfied souls were one Sunday morning astonished out of their senses by such a scuffling of broken boots, such a rustle of shoddy rags, and such a stertorous breathing of congregated misery as never before had desecrated their brick-and-mortar habitation of Wesleyanism.

William Booth had made himself an apostle to the lads of Nottingham slums; he had preached to them in the open, gathered a circle about him, and was on fire to bring them within the fold of the Methodists. If he was happy kneeling in the streets at night and praying with them, he desired to be happier still by praying with them on Sunday, praying with these ragged roughs and toughs within the consecrated walls of Wesley Chapel.

And so it came about one Sunday that he marched his first regiment of the ragged and neglected into the aisles of the most respectable Temple, conducted them into the best pews he could find, and sat among them almost quivering with satisfaction and delight. But the effect of this invasion was not what he had hoped.

The young enthusiast was called before Authority, was argued with, was instructed, and was finally told that lie might bring these outcasts into the chapel only if he entered by the back door (invisible behind the pulpit) and seated his converts in obscure benches reserved particularly for the impecunious and shabby.

One of the most notable Wesleyan preachers of the present time cannot think of this and other incidents connected with Nottingham Wesleyanism, presently to be described, without an angry indignation. He can see perfectly well that if Hugh Price Hughes and many another Wesleyan preacher of later times had been minister of that chapel in Nottingham, William Booth would never have been lost to the Methodists.

But I think it is truer to say that Hugh Price Hughes, and men like him, both among the Methodists and the Anglican communion, owe their enthusiasm and their democratic Christianity to the Salvation Army, and that this Army was too spontaneous and original an expression of religious experience to have grown up within any of the fixed and settled Churches.

As for this particular incident, plainly enough there is much to be said for the judgment delivered by Authority. One may be indignant about it from afar off, but to sit for hours among a company of unwashed, malodorous, and possibly diseased humanity is not an experience healthful for the body nor conducive to religious concentration.

It is a merit in William Booth that he saw the validity of this objection; that, young and headstrong as he was, he did not immediately abandon the work; that, hurt and chilled as surely he must have been, he yet bowed to the ruling, accepted the judgment, and obeyed his religious superiors.

But he felt more and more the call of the streets. As soon as ever his work would allow, he was preaching to the miserables and outcasts of Nottingham, seeking sinners, interesting the indifferent, thundering the wrath of God against wickedness and transgression. He won one man who was famous in the town as a “character,” the drunken, wife-beating, humorous-minded rascal, known as “Besom Jack,” of whom mention has been made.

This man had lived an utterly abominable life. He went about the streets selling brooms, and every penny that he gained in this manner was spent upon drink. His poor wife had to beg at the doors of her neighbours for a few used tea-leaves, which she boiled up afresh, and so lived, starving and terrified. Booth won this man, won him so completely that he became a faithful follower of the street preachers, working for them, helping them, saving the old companions of his drunken days, and devoting himself in his home to making amends for his past iniquity.

His conversion created something of a sensation. It was not recognized as a miracle, but it was talked about as something either amusing or interesting, something for mockery and sneers, or for discussion and timorous questioning, according to the faith or no faith of the talkers.

“The leading men in the Church to which I belonged,” says Booth, “were afraid I was going too fast, and gave me plenty of caution, quaking and fearing at every new departure, but never a word of encouragement to help me. But I went forward all the same.”

He remarks that there were many indications in those early events of the organization which he was destined to bring into existence several years afterwards. Not only was there preaching in the streets, not only was there a tracking down of particular sinners, not only was there a total insistence on the absolute necessity of a changed heart, but every opportunity was seized by the young enthusiast for striking the torpid imaginations of the people with the realities of spiritual life.

One of his followers, for instance, a young girl of humble parentage, was brought to her deathbed; William Booth and his friends prayed and sang at her bedside; she died with the expectation of heaven shining in her face, and her funeral was made an occasion for triumph and rejoicing.

To the end of his days he never forgot that funeral. He remembers that it was snowing, and he tells how a procession was formed in the white streets, and how the body of the girl was borne to her grave through the snowfall between rows of watching people, arid followed by his regiment of helpers singing hymns of victory and joy.

So consumed was he by the passion for saving souls that reticence and restraint to him were like ropes about the legs of a starving man seeking for food. He was working hard for daily bread, it must be remembered, from early in the morning until seven, often eight, o’clock at night; it was only for a few dark hours that his fiery soul had opportunity for seeking the welfare of his fellow-creatures; all the passion and tremendous sincerity of his impetuous spirit, pent up during the hours of uncongenial toil, burst their bonds in the brief evenings of his ministration and made him what men call a zealot and a fanatic.

It is important to observe, however, that the thought of entering the ministry, of giving up everything for the preaching of religion, had not yet even occurred to his mind. He regarded himself as a layman. He considered that one of the first charges on his life was the support of his mother and sisters. He was very much in earnest about his future, terribly distressed by the extreme difficulty of earning a living.

Again and again the complaint breaks out that he was stung with bitterness by the pitiful position in which he found himself placed — a position of bound apprentice to a niggardly employer, earning but a small wage, and forced to witness, he, the only son of his mother, the calamitous poverty of that shabby smallware shop in Goose Gate.

He had been sent to the best school in Nottingham; he had been encouraged to regard himself as a gentleman; the talk of his father had been all of fortune-making and fine living; until he was thirteen years of age it had never once occurred to him that he would have to work hard, and, working hard, find himself unable to support life.

His mother was a proud woman, of better family than his father; his sisters were girls of strong character and impatient of poverty. He was galled by his helplessness, vexed with his destiny.

At the beginning of his religious zeal he was opposed by his family. His efforts to spiritualize the life of his home were met with impatience and counter-attacks upon his new-found theology. Presently he gained his elder sister, Ann; later he won his invalid sister, Emma; and later still Mary Booth, his mother, surrendered to his insistent appeals. But for some years he received scarcely any encouragement in his home, and at the beginning was definitely withstood and gainsaid.

Therefore we have the drama presented to us of a young man straining every nerve .to support a family opposed to the divine interests of his innermost life, a young man committed to a form of employment extremely distasteful to his mind, who felt himself urged and driven by the Spirit of God to seek sinners and to save the lost, and who used every minute of his leisure in this work against the discouragement of his religious superiors and the opposition of his family.

If those who later in his career did not scruple, but actually hastened, to attack this singular and pure-minded man, charging him, among other sins, with hypocrisy and cant and self-seeking — if they had known of these first chapters in his religious life, had known of his courageous devotion, of his intense solitude of soul, of his manful struggle against forces which crush heroism and turn enthusiasm to bitterness and despair, surely they had laid their hands upon their mouths.

He experienced in those years, and for many years afterwards, a ceaseless hindrance to the clamour of his soul; and, impulsive, masterful, and wilful as he was by nature, even while he pressed forward on the path of spiritual duty, he yet loyally bowed his back to the burden of necessity and carried his load with a stout heart. He not only helped, so far as he could, to support his mother and sisters, but he looked forward to the future with this objective always before his eyes.

Chaper 5

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