The
Life of General William Booth
Chapter
8 ~ 1849
Contents
THE CALL TO PREACH
AMONG the disappointments
which met our young venturer in London was the impossibility of getting
work outside the pawnhrokery business. He had come now to dislike the
business.
He was as yet by no means anhungered and athirst to be free of secular
labour that he might preach the Gospel of Christ; at this time he had
seen nothing of London’s destitution, nothing of those black depths
where multitudes of human beings perish in darkness and sin; his experience
of London was largely the experience of respectable and suburban London;
and with this first impression in his mind—he was twenty years of
age—his idea was to preach on Sunday and work for his living during
the week-day, pushing his fortunes with all his might, for the sake of
his mother and sister, as well as for himself.
But there was no work for him except his old work, and accordingly into
a pawnbroker’s shop in Walworth he went to earn his living. A new
experience in religion awaited him here:
My new master
very closely resembled the old one in many respects. In one particular
he differed from him very materially, and that was, he made a great profession
of religion. The first master was a Unitarian, knowing nothing about even
the theory of godliness. I never remember him uttering a sentence that
showed that he had any saving faith in God or any sympathy with godly
people during the whole six years I was with him.
My second master believed in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and in the
Church of which he was a member, but seemed to be utterly ignorant of
either the theory or practice of experimental godliness, and as to the
spiritual interests of the dead world around him, he was as indifferent
to their future well-being as were the vicious crowds themselves whom
he so heartily despised.
All he seemed, to me, to want was to make money, and all he seemed to
want me for was to help him in the sordid, selfish task. So it was work,
work, work, morning, noon, and night. I was practically a white slave,
being only allowed my liberty on the Sabbath, and an hour or two one night
a week, and then the rule was, home by ten o’clock, or the door
will be locked against you.
This law was rigidly enforced in my case, although he knew that I travelled
long distances preaching the Gospel, in which he and his sanctimonious
wife professed to believe. To get home in time, many a Sunday night I
have had to run till out of breath, after walking long distances, and
preaching twice in the day.
Some men might
easily have been disgusted with religion in such a circumstance as this,
particularly a young man whose heart was sore with disappointment and
weighted with the difficulties which confronted him; but William Booth
never lost by encountering hypocrisy; he gained by it; he never made the
hypocrisy of others an excuse for relaxing his efforts, rather was he
braced by it to show the true face of religion to mankind.
In an age when there was almost a vogue of this odious religious hypocrisy,
an hypocrisy so general that Dickens in his struggle to extirpate it flung
himself into the fight with an impatient exaggeration which delighted
the base and confirmed the feeble in their feebleness — in this
age of deception and self-deception, of formalism, cant, smoothness, and
detestable complacency, William Booth looked the distorted falsity in
the face and saw only the beauty and glory of the reality.
He deepened his own intense consciousness of religion by contact with
the shallow pretence of a merely formal and professed religion. The less
of truth he saw in others, the more hungrily he desired it in himself.
To abandon religion, because of false religion in others, never so much
as entered his mind.
But there were difficulties in his path:
My way was complicated, but I stuck to my faith and the preaching of it as far as I had the opportunity. It is true that here and there I made friends in my preaching excursions with whom I fraternized, as far as my little leisure afforded, enjoying occasional seasons of useful communion. But my poor heart was desolate in the extreme. It seemed as though I had got launched out on a wide and dreary ocean without a companion vessel or a friendly port in view.
Something of his state of mind at this period may be gathered from a worn and faded document found among his papers after death, the pathetic and honest confession of a young soul conscious of its weakness and seeking strength from a solemn and secret protestation of faith. This little paper bears the date December 6, 1849, and proceeds in this manner:
RESOLUTIONS
I do promise — my God helping —
1st That I will rise every morning sufficiently early (say 20 minutes before seven o’clock) to wash, dress, and have a few minutes, not less than 5, in private prayer.
2ndy That I will as much as possible avoid all that babbling and idle talking in which I have lately so sinfully indulged.
3rd That I will endeavour in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of the bleeding Lamb, and by serious conversion and warning endeavour to lead them to think of their immortal souls.
4thly That I will not read less than 4 chapters in God’s word every day.
5thly That I will strive to live closer to God, and to seek after holiness of heart, and leave providential events with God.
6thly That I will read this over every day or at least twice a week.
God help me, enable me to cultivate a spirit of self denial and to yield myself a prisoner of love to the Redeemer of the world.Amen & Amen
WILLIAM BOOTH.I feel my own weakness and without God’s help I shall not keep these resolutions a day. The Lord have mercy upon my guilty soul.
I claim the Blood
Yes, oh Yes,
Jesus died for me.
Faithfully
he performed the duties entrusted to him, making himself not merely
useful but almost invaluable to his slave-driving master, for into everything
they do it is the nature of such men as this to put the whole force
of their powers; but it was only when he was free from the shop and
out in the streets of London on his business of preaching religion that
he really lived, and really hoped.
Weak and delicate as he was, hard and exhausting as was his daily work,
he gave himself up on Sundays and his one spare week-night to such preaching
in the London chapels he visited as startled and shocked the polite
congregations with the strength and fire of its rugged energy.
And when the preaching was over, and he had fraternized for a few moments
with the few who shared his enthusiasm, the Nottingham lad would take
to his heels and run through the lamp-lighted streets of the suburbs
back to the attic-bed above the shop in Walworth.
The more he saw of London the more insistent became this desire to preach
the religion of Christ. So far as one can see, it was during these first
months in Walworth that the suggestion made to him in Nottingham a year
before by Samuel Dunn came home to his mind as a real and definite idea.
The spectacle of the London streets, thronged at night by crowds of
people who often appeared before his vision as godless and vicious and
perishing, worked upon his imagination and quickened the idea that he
should preach Christ, whatever might be the consequences to his earthly
fortunes.
It must be remembered that the great temperance movement had not struck
root at this period, and that the sights of London streets, particularly
in the poorer quarters, were infinitely worse than they are now.
Drunkenness was not only horribly common, it was every one’s opportunity
for hilarity. It provided the humorous incidents of transpontine melodrama
in the theatres, arid the only break of cheerful comedy in the sordid
tragedy of the streets.
Women might be breaking their hearts at home, children might be crying
pitifully for food and clothing, but the sight of uproarious men rolling
and lurching home from the ale-house seldom aroused anything but amusement
in those who turned the head to look after them.
And, again, there was no Education Act. The worst of the narrow, grimy
streets of London were thronged with ragged, barefooted, unwashed, foul-mouthed,
and in many cases criminally-minded children, to save whom neither the
State nor religion made scarcely an effort.
The parents of these children were either the idle rascals of street-corners,
or the sweated and exhausted victims of a conscienceless commercialism.
A man could go but a little distance in London without encountering
such men and women, and such helpless little children, as seem degraded
out of the likeness to humanity.
To William Booth the call to preach Christ came in these London streets,
not dramatically and suddenly. but with a steady and persisting tone
of resolute command. He could not doubt the reality of that call, and
his faith would not let him disobey it.
He has left a record of his feelings on this matter, written before
he had really looked into the Stygian depths of the London abyss, and
from this record one may discern how his mind was acted upon in youth
by the sights he saw in suburbs that passed in those days for respectable:
How
can anybody with spiritual eyesight talk of having no call, when there
are such multitudes around them who never hear a word of God, and never
intend to; who can never hear, indeed, without the sort of preacher
who will force himself upon them? Can a man keep right in his own soul
who can see all that, and yet stand waiting for a “call”
to preach? Would they wait so for a “call” to help anyone
to escape from a burning building, or to snatch a sinking child from
a watery grave?
Does not growth in grace, or even ordinary growth of intelligence, necessarily
bring with it that deepened sense of eternal truths which must intensify
the conviction of duty to the perishing world?
Does not an unselfish love, the love that goes out towards the unloving,
demand of a truly loving soul immediate action for the salvation of
the unloved?
And are there not persons who know that they possess special gifts,
such as robust health, natural eloquence, or power of voice, which specially
make them responsible for doing something for souls?
And yet I do not at all forget, that above and beyond all these things,
there does come to some a special and direct call, which it is peculiarly
fatal to disregard, and peculiarly strengthening to enjoy and act upon.
I believe that there have been many eminently holy and useful men who
never had such a call; but that does not at all prevent anyone from
asking God for it, or blessing Him for His special kindness when He
gives it.
The call, at any rate, had come for him. It was a call from Heaven,
and from humanity as well.