The
Life of General William Booth
Vol.
2 ~ Chapter 33
Contents
CONCLUSION
WHEN
the body of Charles Darwin was borne into Westminster Abbey it must have
seemed to the sceptic that the dead naturalist entered that great Christian
church as a conqueror; nor would he have seen anything to modify this
ironical view in the fact that the Bible still remained on the lectern;
he would have said that The Origin of Species had already made its way
to the pulpit.
He would have found confirmation for this view thirty years later when
he saw the doors of Westminster Abbey closed against the body of William
Booth. If he witnessed the spectacle of multitudes in the streets gathered
to watch the progress of this dead body to a cemetery in the suburbs,
he would have dismissed it easily enough as the expiring flicker of emotionalism.
Two years later, looking back on the nineteenth century from the ruins
of a war which was engulfing the whole world, the sceptic would have seen
these two men, Charles Darwin and William Booth, in a strange and arresting
juxtaposition.
He would have seen the one calmly and thoroughly laying the foundations
of a philosophy which, manfully applied to human life, could have no other
conclusion than war. And the other, almost in a frenzy of earnestness,
neglecting no means, however extravagant, to attract attention, posting
from one side of the world to the other with the only unanswerable antithesis
of that philosophy. He would have seen the wise and prudent of the world
following after the man of science, and the humble and poor following
after the man of God.
And he would have seen that while the one taught men a philosophy which
could do nothing but ensure them destruction, and the other preached a
religion which alone could save them from destruction, yet the tide of
human thought set steadily away from salvation, flowing, imperceptibly
at first, but afterwards in a flood, to the overwhelming of the human
race.
A profounder view of these two men brings out a difference which is of
significant importance. Charles Darwin was the most exact and scrupulous
of thinkers; never publishing a word on any subject to which he had not
given long and continuous thought, excluding from every sentence he wrote
the smallest influence of his emotional nature.
On the other hand, William Booth, trusting himself so largely to his emotional
nature, and regarding the intellect almost with suspicion, spoke only
with the single care that the words he uttered came from his heart. The
one man addressed the heads of his contemporaries, the other their hearts;
and while the one felt that the most precise and guarded phraseology was
necessary for his utterances, the other took little thought what he would
say or what he should write, trusting himself to a Power which science
refuses to regard even as a remote hypothesis.
But in spite of his almost religious care for exactitude, and in spite
of his most scrupulous regard for truth, the precise and careful thinker,
addressing himself to the reasoning faculty in -man, could not prevent
that faculty from rushing away with his thesis to the abyss of destruction;
so little faith can man repose in his reason. And, if the world had held
its reason in leash, and given to the preacher but a tithe of the confidence
it gave to the thinker, destruction would have been averted and a firm
step taken towards millennium. These facts in their history men are in
the habit of seeing only when it is too late.
No thinker of the last century exercised an influence over the mind of
the world comparable with Darwin’s; and no moralist of the last
century exercised an influence over the heart of the world comparable
with William Booth’s. Unhappily for the children of their contemporaries,
it was the influence of Darwin and not the influence of William Booth
which determined the direction of human thought. The world of power gave
itself up to the man of intellect. It turned its back on the man of emotion.
Darwin’s thesis, developed to its inevitable conclusion by the rationalists
of Germany, led the nations step by step to war; and not to a war such
as semi-Christians waged in meeker times, but to a perfectly logical war
of uttermost ferocity and extremest cruelty, a war in which chivalry and
courtesy and mercy — qualities which do not belong to animals —
were very properly swept aside, and men sought every means that their
reasons could suggest for inflicting the maximum of agony and achieving
the maximum of death.
It is a folly to say that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin. It is truer
to say that he was the most discerning and honest prophet of Darwinism.
If the theory of Darwin could be taken out of zoology and applied to man,
or, rather, if man had no category of his own, but belonged to zoology
and must be himself applied to Darwin’s theory, then Nietzsche,
far more than Karl Pearson or Herbert Spencer, saw to the end of this
truth.
Man, if an animal, must seek power; and in the struggle for power there
can be no right but might, and no law but necessity. Struggle for existence
does not end at the confines of the jungle in a world of logical Darwinism.
To acquire, to possess, to dominate, this becomes the only rational drive
of human intelligence when the incongruous moral nature has been thrown
to the winds as a superstition.
Our fathers could not see this evident truth so vitally as some of their
sons see it now. The last half of the nineteenth century witnessed an
attempt on the part of religion, philosophy, and politics to effect a
compromise with Darwinism. No man of any weight had the courage to denounce
Darwinism as morally wrong, intellectually false, spiritually absurd.
The most our fathers could bring themselves to do was to point out that
the Mosaic cosmogony harmonized in some respects with the processes of
evolution, and to patch the rotting garment of a combative civilization
with the shrinkable cloth of philanthropy.
We see now that the theory of Darwin is a partial explanation of a few,
and those not the most perplexing, structural phenomena of Natural History.
We see that there is no light to be gained from that theory on the supreme
problem of Beauty, that the tail feather of the peacock is still as great
a mystery as when the contemplation of its delicate shading made Darwin
sick with bafflement, and we see still more clearly that no light from
that theory can help us to begin to understand the movement in man’s
mind towards beauty, renunciation, and moral perfection. These things
we have seen at the innumerable graves of our children.
Prussia, in seeking World Power, has planted her iron heel on the doctrine
of struggle for existence. Men are no longer deluded by phrases. They
are very earnestly now using their hearts as well as their reasons, their
moral natures as well as their microscopes; they see that Darwinism does
not work. It does not work, and therefore it cannot be true. In the study
it seemed true to think about “the struggle for existence”;
but directly that philosophy escaped from the abstract air of theory,
and was presented to men as a fundamental law of action, it collapsed,
and in its fall dragged down the partial civilization of a sceptical,
compromising, and dishonest Christendom.
There is something in nature that is not a struggle for the trough, something
in man that is not a struggle for gain and gear. There is something in
nature struggling for liberty, and something in man struggling for love.
Moreover, in man, the individual person, there is a struggle between one
self and another, a higher self and a lower self, a struggle which, from
the days of David to the days of William Booth, has inspired the utterances
of every man whose words have haunted the human race, a struggle for moral
perfection, a struggle for the highest and uttermost good, a struggle
to be fought to a finish at all cost to body’s peace.
It was William Booth, more than any other of Darwin’s contemporaries,
who demonstrated that the spiritual nature of man is a fact of human experience.
Others were more eloquent and more intellectually brilliant in arguing
that the spiritual nature of man was at least a tenable hypothesis, but
no man so decisively proved this spiritual nature to be a fact.
In nearly every climate and among nearly every people, the most civilized
and the most savage, he appealed to the moral nature of man, and by the
power of his plea transformed the worst of men, even the lowest and the
most abased, into good citizens capable of extremest self-sacrifice. He
demonstrated that there is a force in human evolution of infinitely greater
power than self-interest; that sympathy can heal the sick; that love can
raise the dead; and that co-operation inspired by self-abnegation, and
compassion inspired by self-sacrifice, can save the souls even of those
whom an English follower of Darwin has described as “Social Vermin.”
This great work, which history will remember was attacked by no individual
so violently as by Darwin’s fighting-lieutenant, Professor Huxley,
failed to avert the calamity of war. It failed to save the human race
from that calamity; but in the light of war we see this work of William
Booth perhaps with a new understanding and with a higher appreciation.
Civilization cannot stand on the sands of Darwinism.
The rain has descended, the floods have come, and the winds have blown
and beaten upon that civilization, and it has fallen, and great was the
fall of it. Civilization can only stand if it is built upon a rock, and
the only rock which can withstand the storms of the ages is the rock of
the Moral Law. Man can no more leave God out of his philosophies than
he can live without his heart or see without his eyes.
William Booth was one of the last century’s greatest prophets of
this truth, and certainly its boldest, most courageous, and most effective
protagonist. His supreme interest for the historian lies in the force
with which his intuition carried him straight to the very centre of human
knowledge in an age when men were allowing their intellects to lead them
towards the abyss of annihilation.
He saw the insufficiency of reason when it was at its highest in the estimation
of men; and he saw the supremacy of emotion in a time when it was most
suspected by men. He knew, with but little help from his reason, that
the Infinite is not to be examined by the brain of any finite creature;
and he knew, with only his moral nature to help him, that the Infinite
may be clasped and held by the upstretching hands of love and faith. It
was to him a matter for amazement that men could be content with only
their reasons when they held in their possession those great forces of
emotion which can lift the poet into regions where no astronomer can follow
him, and the saint into transcendencies which neither philosopher nor
theologian is able to penetrate.
We need not fear to minimise the greatness of the man by confessing that
he fell short of the intellectualist standards of the age. But he is not
to he judged by those standards. He does not stand in the company of intellectual
giants — wrong-headed or right-headed. No religious genius has ever
stood, or can ever stand, in that company. William
Booth
stands among the moralists, and his full stature is only seen when, considering
the circumstances of his age, he is brought into comparison with the great
emotionalists of history — those children of the world who have
sought the salvation of men, not as men of science seek rational truth,
but as lovers seek the beloved.
If he has no place among the intellectuals, he has equally, in the region
of emotion, no place among the mystics. We approach the truth of his measure
when we see that on the mountain top he was but a tourist, and that his
abiding-place on earth was with men, in the pit of darkness and pain.
He has left behind him no haunting tenderness for the sons of men, no
words which they will remember in dark hours, no music which will steal
into their souls when their eyes are blinded with tears.
But he has left to the world the memory of a life which deliberately sought
the pit, and in the pit worked miracles upon the souls of men by the force
of a childlike confidence in God, and by the power of a love which, even
if it be judged inferior to the love of the mystic, was nevertheless an
infinitely more real and honest love than any carefully measured affection
which had hitherto satisfied philanthropy.
The character of this love is the centre of his interest for mankind.
It was determined in no small degree by the circumstances of his life.
His childhood was clouded by suffering; his youth was fretted by deprivation
and inhibition; and his early manhood was not only a hard struggle for
physical existence, but an infinitely harder struggle for spiritual liberty.
He came to his work out of this darkness and out of this suffering; he
came to it with but little traditional refinement in his mind, and with
still less of an imposed education which is worth speaking about; he came
to it simply with a will perfectly surrendered to God, and with a heart
that had no greater hunger than to sacrifice itself for his fellow-men.
He was in the religious world of his time something of a Charles Dickens.
He was moved by pathos and humour; he loathed cant and abominated shams;
he had a genuine compassion for the sinner; and he loved the poor with
a love that was the very breath of his life. He sorrowed over the sins
of the multitude not only because those sins expatriated them from the
presence of God, but because those sins afflicted their bodies, darkened
their minds, ruined their homes, and finally broke their hearts.
He wanted mankind to be happier. His ideal was very like the ideal of
Charles Dickens — domestic comfort on earth and compensation in
Heaven. He wanted men to live in decent houses, with domestic love, with
neighbourly kindness, and with faith in a future world. He wanted them
to see how terrible it was that children should be hungry and naked, that
women should be drunken and dissolute, and that the very best of men should
sink beneath the level of the beast. He was not a revolutionist. He had
little faith in the power of Parliaments to create Utopias. His idea of
Utopia was not perhaps very inviting. But he loved men so honestly and
so earnestly that in seeking to achieve his humble Utopia he performed
the greatest of all human miracles.
It was William Booth who taught the world that the first thing to do in
seeking to turn a bad man into a good man is to make him feel that you
really care for him, really care whether he sinks or swims. If it be said
that all notable evangelists, and even all orthodox preachers of religion,
have uttered much the same precept in every age of the Church, we would
venture to answer that no word in the language of men is more misused,
more misunderstood, and more unrealized than the word Love.
By which we mean, that it is the most difficult thing in the world for
one person to love another; that the ocean which separates affection from
love is all but infinite; and that to stop short at affection either in
the domestic or the religious life is to live completely outside the revelation
of God. “Were a single drop of what is in my heart,” said
St. Catherine, of Genoa, “to fall into hell, hell itself would be
changed into paradise.”
Love is so greatly the rarest thing in the world that few are even startled
by the blasphemy which makes it a synonym for animal desire. It is so
wonderfully the rarest thing in the world that we are amazed when we read
of a person dying of a broken heart. And it is so entirely the rarest
thing in the world that we are either greatly amused or greatly impressed
when we encounter husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister,
friend and friend, who perfectly and beautifully love one another.
Happy families are common enough, but families in which the one relation
between all the members is the relation of love — the love imperishably
defined by St. Paul — are to be found perhaps but once in a life’s
long journey. Men, indeed, the makers of a civilization founded on combat,
have not yet thought what it is to love; and for this reason more than
all other reasons religion has failed to transform human existence.
No word so common as love, no term so debased, no ideal so woefully unrealized.
The love which is sublimely unconscious of self, which is for ever at
rest, which is unshaken by events and unchanged by time, which seeks only
the welfare of another, which lives its life in the life of another, which
gives and gives again, never asking, never thinking to ask, for return,
which is patient, which is tolerant, which is satisfied — this ministering
and adoring love, at once human and divine, at once domestic and religious,
this love which “bears it out even to the edge of doom,” which
seeketh not its own, which is the very centre and principle of the Divine
Will, this love, we may say, has hardly yet become even an ideal of the
human race.
Such love is one of the legends which have come down to us like inarticulate
skeletons from an age bemused with romance; and in the welter of our modern
life, in the clash of cur social conflict, where the master passion is
self-assertion, self-aggrandisement, and self-realization, this foolish
memory of the past fades as the stars of heaven fade before the glare
of our electric light. Perfect love, we say, is not to be expected; and
yet Christianity is either perfect love or it ceases to be Christian.
“The Christian ideal,” it is said, “has not been tried
and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.”
Really to love another person is difficult even for the best of the human
race; but how difficult, how almost impossible, when that other person
is infamous, degraded and repulsive. Nevertheless, to read the Gospel
in church, to pray for love, and to preach about love, making not one
single effort of love in our dealings with the abandoned or the lost,
is not this manifestly to live our lives entirely outside the Kingdom
of Heaven?
Christianity is, surely, this intense, unselfish, and ministering love
or it is no whit different from the ancient religions of terror and superstition.
“Many shall say to Me in that day!” And the judgment is, “I
never knew you!” Nor is this judgment pronounced against the abandoned
and the lost, but against those who professed the name of the Judge, and
implicitly believed that they were doers of His will. “I never knew
you”— that is to say, You did kind things without kindness;
you wore indeed the garments of love, but there was no love in your hearts;
that is to say, You never once saw the meaning of My life.
It is when we reflect upon this absence of love from the world, carefully
considering in our minds the difference which exists between social kindness
and self-sacrificing love, that we are able to see at least something
of the greatness of the life of William Booth. His supreme contribution
to the religious experience of mankind lies in his proof that by the power
of love the worst of men can be changed into the best of men; but his
highest and most enduring greatness is the genuine passion of love which
urged him into the hells of human existence to work those miracles of
conversion.
He groaned over the degradation of men, he agonized over the debasement
of women, he wept over the sufferings of children. Never has any man whose
whole nature so recoiled from the sight of pain, and whose sensitive spirit
so shrank from a recital of grief, waded so far into the sea of agony.
He suffered in helping the suffering. He was tortured in rescuing the
tortured.
And for every one he helped and rescued at the cost of suffering and torture
which only God can compute, he knew that ten thousand others were perishing
without comfort and without hope. The travail of his soul was not the
travail of a hermit seeking in the solitude of a wilderness to comprehend
the glory and the greatness of God, but the travail of a man living in
the midst of human want and human sorrow, and with all the love in his
heart being able, to succour only one here ——another there.
And he suffered because of men’s indifference and men’s incredulity.
He had proofs to show in every country of the world that love can transform
the evil life and restore the shattered life; an enormous host followed
him wherever he moved, shouting the hallelujah of triumph; but the world,
for the most part, shrugged its shoulders, and left the suffering to suffer
and the perishing to die.
And in spite of the malignity which assailed him, the envy which traduced
him, and the hatred which never ceased to compass his destruction, this
love for the poorest, the lowliest, and lost persisted to the end of his
life. His greatness is this, that among the many who speak of love he
lived a life of love.
Fortunately for the enlightenment of the future and for the encouragement
of all ages the documents left behind him by William Booth present to
our gaze an indubitable likeness of the living and imperfect man. None
of the mists which still creep towards us from the Middle Ages and obscure
the portraits of the saints dim his rich humanity; nor is it likely that
in days to come any forlorn worshipper of heroes will arise to invest
this simple preacher in the ghostly robes of myth and legend.
Aberglaube will not invade. He will confront for ever the gaze of mankind,
a rough, fallible, and tempestuous figure, a man of little learning, a
man of vigorous impulsiveness, a man masterful and vehement, a man inordinately
zealous and inordinately ambitious, but a man inspired, and in everything
one who with the whole force and passion of his extraordinary nature loved
his fellow-men.
This love for his fellow-men will be seen as no perfect and beautiful
aspiration in the vague region of impossibility; it will be seen, indeed,
shot with the faults of his character and tinged with the hues of his
human nature — never becoming the romantic love which sent Damien
to the lepers, still less the exquisite love which made the very elements
brethren of St. Francis; but when men contemplate the love of William
Booth, steadily and dispassionately, remembering that this love manifested
itself in the wretchedest and most hateful places of life, and at a time
when rationalism was pouring its scorn upon emotion —“that
great and precious part of our natures,” as John Morley calls it,
“that lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding”—
and that it ever groped its way into the black shadows where misery hides
its tears, and into the outer darkness where sin deserts its victims,
they will become conscious, in the greatness and strength of that dogged,
unyielding, most stubborn and intensely practical love, of a beauty which
at least consumes the faults of a day, and of a glory which at least does
away with the shortcomings of a temperament.
If he failed to avert Armageddon, more than any man in the latter part
of the nineteenth century he helped to create the Social Conscience, without
which there could be no hope of a League of Nations; and he helped to
create that Social Conscience, not by a political formula or by any merely
philanthropic invention, but by the force and energy of his boundless
love.
Do we not come as close as is possible to the truth of this man when we
say that had he been one of the Twelve, Simon Peter would not have been
alone when he stepped out upon the Sea of Galilee?
End