The Life of General William Booth

Vol. 2 ~ Chapter 7 ~ 1888 - 1899
Contents

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ADVENTURE

LATE one night — it was in the early morning hours — in the year 1888 William Booth returned to London from a campaign in the south of England, and slept exceedingly ill when he arrived at his home.

Bramwell Booth, living near by, was early in attendance next morning, and scarcely had he entered the dressing-room, quick, alert, and cheerful, when his father, who was walking to and fro with hanging braces and stormy hair, burst out at him, “Here, Bramwell! do you know that fellows are sleeping out at night on the bridges? — sleeping out all night on the stone?”

Bramwell, thus checked in his greeting, exclaimed, “Yes, General; why, didn’t you know that?”

The General appeared to be thunderstruck. He had seen those tragic huddled forms benched on stone for the first time on the previous night, and his own sleep in a warm bed had been robbed in consequence. “You knew that,” he said, “and you haven’t done anything!”

To this attack the Chief of the Staff made answer — first, that the Salvation Army could not at present undertake to do everything that ought to be done in the world; and, second — he admits now that he spoke like a copy-book — that one must he careful about the dangers of indiscriminate charity.

The General broke in angrily on this exordium. “Oh, I don’t care about all that stuff,” he said: “I’ve heard it before. But go and do something! Do something, Bramwell, do something!” And he walked about the room, running his fingers through his long beard and speaking with a loving rage and pity of the homeless wretches forced to sleep in the recesses of the London bridges.

“Get a shed for them,” he ordered; “anything will be better than nothing; a roof over their heads, walls round their bodies”; and then he added, with characteristic caution, “you needn’t pamper them.”

This was the beginning of the great social scheme which was announced to the world two years later by means of the book In Darkest England and the Way Out. Twenty years before, William Booth had published his pamphlet How to Reach the Masses with the Gospel. He now began to see, after this twenty years of ceaseless labour, that he must first take arms against the worst of social conditions before he could carry the saving health of religion, even with the great force he had raised up in the meantime, to these ultimate masses.

His first impression of London, as the reader will remember, had been one of horror at the godless condition of the multitudes. His compassion for these multitudes had been moved by their spiritual neglect. All his anxiety and all his extraordinary activity for the past twenty years had been directed by this compassion, and it was purely evangelical in its nature.

“Let any man,” said Cardinal Manning, “stand on the high northern ridge which commands London from West to East and ask himself how many in this teeming, seething whirlpool of men have never been baptized? have never been taught the Christian Faith? never set foot in a Church? How many are living ignorantly in sin, how many with full knowledge are breaking the laws of God, what multitudes are blinded or besotted or maddened with drink, what sins of every kind and dye and beyond all count are committed day and night?

It would surely be within the truth to say that half the population in London are practically without Christ and without God in the world. If this be so then at once we can see how and why the Salvation Army exists.” This, for twenty years, was the spirit of William Booth. He mourned over “the spiritual desolation of London.”

He asked himself how many were baptized? how many were taught the Christian Faith? how many set foot in a Church? But he began now to ask himself questions of another kind. He asked himself how many were hungry and thirsty? how many were naked? how many were homeless and cold?

To most of us it would be a platitude to assert that these questions were an expression of the Christ spirit; we should be impatient with a person who pointed out to us, as Drummond in a famous pamphlet pointed out to a former generation, that the very essence of Christianity lies not in doctrinal exactitude but in service, and service of the most simple and human character.

But to William Booth, although his impulsive nature drove him at all costs to do something (Herbert Spencer would not have liked that exclamation), this venture in social reform sometimes appeared a step aside from his real path, and to the end of his life he never perhaps perfectly apprehended the entirely spiritual and religious character of his own social service.

This troubled and divided spirit which manifested itself in his life from 1888 onwards, is one of the most valuable clues to his personality. His love for men made him a social reformer, almost against his will. His faith in conversion, bound up with his faith in his mission as a preacher, haunted him like a ghost, almost rebuking him, as he fed the hungry and housed the homeless. He never understood Theism; he never realized the profoundest meaning of Immanence.

The soul of the man was saturated with the dogmatism of evangelical Deism. If his heart had not been as greatly saturated with as simple and emotional love for humanity as ever illuminated our sad and tragic history, he would never have glanced at social reform. But his pity tortured him, and he was torn between Martha and Mary. The better part manifestly was to hold up before a perishing world the Cross of Christ; to build a shelter for the homeless, and to carry meat to the hungry, this was obviously to be busied with temporal things.

From the beginning of this new venture the Salvation Army differentiated with the greatest care between its social and spiritual work. The division was symptomatic of William Booth’s theology. Professor Huxley, who knew as little of modern theology as Booth, attacked the Army for using social work as a mask for its spiritual work. William Booth defended himself against this attack without asking his critic to indicate to the world precisely where social work ended and religious work began. He never once quoted in his controversies on this subject the words of Christ Himself — “Depart from me . . . for I was an hungered and ye gave me no meat.”

It is possible, we think, that William Booth might have been the very greatest force in history since St. Paul if he had seen vividly the spiritual character of social service — that is to say, if he had thrown himself with undivided will and undistracted religious enthusiasm into the work of righting men’s social wrongs. But in that case his revolution would certainly have been a violent one, and the world’s politics would by now have suffered a vast change.

For if this man could win the affection of the saddest and most abandoned classes in the community, addressing them with a Mosaic authority on their duty towards God, what must have been his effect in the abyss, among the hungry and the embittered, if he had addressed them on their wrongs, not as a political agitator, but as the prophet of God? He was, however, at the very centre of his nature, a convinced Deist, a convinced conservative, and a convinced individualist. I am not sure that he had much faith in democracy’s rightful use of political freedom.

If he missed absolute greatness, it was because his will was divided and because his spirit, even in its most emotional moments, was controlled by one fixed and unshakable idea in religion. He came to greatness, not by the force and power of this religious notion, which he deemed the star of stars which would burn on the front of his crown of glory, but by the suspected force and the distrusted power of that simple and impulsive human sympathy which, inspired by it, transfigured his religiousness and saved him both from fanaticism and sectarian narrowness.

“No one,” says Sainte-Beuve, “ever went through more mental vicissitudes than I have done.” Of William Booth it might be said that no one ever went through more emotional vicissitudes than he did. And it was the purity, the sincerity, and the intensity of this emotion which, in all its vicissitudes, drove the man onward and forced its way into everything he attempted.

In the Preface to his book, In Darkest England and the Way Out, there is one bold moment in which he seems to realize the essentially religious character of his social prop-osition: “. . . my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of them in any way as separate one from the other,” he says, “have cried out for some more comprehensive method of reaching and saving the perishing crowds.”

But this sentence, we think, slipped in unawares; for the whole Preface might seem to some people as an anxious apologia for interrupting “religious” work. He speaks of the souls already saved in the slums, and acknowledges that “these results have been mainly attained by spiritual means.”

The individualist shows himself immediately: “No doubt it is good for men to climb unaided out of the whirlpool on to the rock of deliverance in the very presence of temptations which have hitherto mastered them, and to maintain a footing there with the same billows of temptation washing over them.”

And then: “I propose to go straight for these sinking classes, and in doing so shall continue to aim at the heart.” Further on: “. . . in this or in any other development that may follow, I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principle on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ.”

“In proposing to add one more to the methods I have already put in operation,” he says, “. . . do not let it be supposed that I am the less dependent upon my old plans, or that I seek anything short of the old conquest.”

To many pious people, as well as to atheists and agnostics, this social campaign of the Salvation Army was more than a dangerous experiment, it was a positive rock of offence; and I have met apparently intelligent people at the present time who protest that the Salvation Army is merely a philanthropic and humanitarian agency in which religion is entirely subservient to social organization.

Moreover, there still exists in the Salvation Army, at any rate in some countries, the sharp division between religious and social work, so far as the mechanism is concerned, which William Booth was most careful to make from the very beginning of his new venture.

In one sense, obviously, William Booth was right. It is easier to feed the hungry man than to turn the heart of the hardened man. Moreover, one may feed a hungry man with no impulse of religion in one’s own heart and without producing the smallest change of any kind in his heart.

Further still, and this was probably General Booth’s most haunting thought as he struggled with his compassion, neither good wages nor comfortable circumstances can give to a man the energy of the spiritual life. He says in his book: “Some of the worst men and women in the world, whose names are chronicled by history with a shudder of horror, were those who had all the advantages that wealth, education, and station could confer or ambition could attain.”

We are disposed to think that in missing the greatness of a revolutionist whose glory would have been that he changed the conditions of civilization, William Booth, by the very means which missed him this greatness, taught to his generation a lesson of infinite significance and incalculable value. For with all the nations of the earth hurling themselves through the gates of legislation and seeking in materialism for the Utopia of their dreams, here at any rate was a man who descended to the social abyss and told the most brutal and the most violent and the most abandoned and the most despairing that unless a man be born again he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

He changed the men, and the men themselves changed their conditions. Legislation, which knows nothing of individuals and regards the heart as a mere expression in the language of sentimentalism, seeks to change multitudes and masses of men by the most pompously announced and the most laboriously debated, but the most trivial, alterations in their conditions.

William Booth saw the folly, the futility. and the awful danger of this method. He was right to insist that the individual man must be changed at the heart. And in

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changing some of the very worst men that ever lived, and in making those same men the self-sacrificing and rejoicing savers of other men as bad as they themselves had once been, he taught to all the nations of the earth a lesson whose value, as we have said without exaggeration, is incalculable.

That he did at certain moments very nearly throw himself whole-heartedly into the work of social reformation, recognizing its religious character and hating with all the vigour of his nature the miserable cant which railed against his undogmatic philanthropy, may be seen in many places throughout his book:

If this were the first time that this wail of hopeless misery had sounded in our ears the matter would have been less serious. It is because we have heard it so often that the case is so desperate. The exceeding bitter cry of the disinherited has become to be as the moaning of the wind thro’ the trees.

And so it rises unceasing, year in year out, and we are too busy or too idle, too indifferent or too selfish, to spare it a thought. Only now and then, on rare occasions, when some clear voice is heard giving more articulate utterance to the miseries of the miserable men, do we pause in the regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as we realise for one brief moment what life means to the inmates of the Slums.

What a satire it is upon our Christianity and our civilization, that the existence of these colonies of heathens and savages in the heart of our capital should attract so little attention! It is no better than a ghastly mockery — theologians might use a stronger word — to call by the name of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost those Churches which in the midst of lost multitudes either sleep in apathy or display a fitful interest in a chasuble.

Why all this apparatus of temples and meeting-houses to save men from perdition in a world which is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them from the inferno of their present life? Is it not time that, forgetting for a moment their wranglings about the infinitely little or infinitely obscure, they should concentrate all their energies on a united effort to break this terrible perpetuity of perdition, and to rescue some at least of those for whom they profess to believe their Founder came to die?

“I leave to others,” he says, “the formulation of ambitious programmes for the reconstruction of our entire social system. . . . In taking this course I am aware that I cut myself off from a wide and attractive field.” He goes so far, looking the problem of England’s submerged millions full in the face, to declare, even while he passes by “those who propose to bring in a new heaven and a new earth by a more scientific distribution of the pieces of gold and silver in the trouser-pockets of mankind”:

It may be that nothing will be put permanently right until everything has been turned upside down. There are certainly so many things that need transforming, beginning with the heart of each individual man and woman, that I do not quarrel with any visionary. . .

But he raps out angrily, in declaring that the problem is urgent and cannot be postponed: “This religious cant, winch rids itself of all the importunity of suffering humanity by drawing unnegotiable bills payable on the other side of the grave, is not more impracticable than the Socialistic clap-trap which postpones all redress of human suffering until after the general overturn.” And to his son Bramwell he wrote on the 18th May, 1888: “Heaven and earth and, if necessary, the other place must be moved to get something done.”

But in spite of his burning desire to get something done, and in spite of his almost boundless enthusiasm for his “Way Out,” the central pull of his nature drew him back again and again from the political implications of this tremendous adventure; and after many years of incredible labour in the social work of the Army he came to wonder — but this, we must be careful to remember, was in his lonely and extreme old age, and even then only in certain moods — whether he ought ever to have diverted any of the energies of the Army from the strictly evangelical responsibilities of the preacher’s vocation.
Before we summarize his proposals for cutting a way out from Darkest England, it must be told how the book itself was written, and in what circumstances William Booth led the way to this new endeavour.

In 1889 the Booths moved from Clapton to a small villa at Hadley Wood. Mrs. Booth’s health had not improved; and the appearance of a small tumour drove her to consult a specialist — Sir James Paget, father of two bishops — and from the lips of this eminent man she learned the true character of her disease.

An operation was suggested after the examination, but Mrs. Booth decided to consider, though she ultimately rejected, the proposal. She asked how long she had to live, and was told reluctantly that perhaps the end would come in eighteen months or two years. After this interview she drove back alone to her home. General Booth was setting off that night for Holland, and he was at home when the cab drove up to the door. He has left on record an account of that meeting with his wife:

After hearing the verdict of the doctors, she drove home alone. That journey can better be imagined than described. She afterwards told me how, as she looked upon the various scenes through the cab window, it seemed that the sentence of death had been passed upon everything: how she knelt upon the cab floor and wrestled in prayer with God; of the unutterable yearnings over me and the children that filled her heart; how the realization of our grief swept over her, and the uncertainties of the near future, when she would be no longer with us.

I shall never forget in this world, or the next, that meeting. I had been watching for the cab and had run out to meet her and help her up the steps. She tried to smile upon me through her tears; but, drawing me into the room, she unfolded gradually to me the result of the interviews. I sat down speechless. She rose from her seat and came and knelt down beside me, saying, “Do you know what was my first thought? That I should not be there to nurse you in your last hour.”

I was stunned. I felt as if the whole world were coming to a standstill. Opposite me, on the wall was a picture of Christ on the cross. I thought I could understand it then as never before. She talked like a heroine, like an angel, to me; she talked as she had never talked before. I could say little or nothing. It seemed as though a hand were laid upon my very heart-strings. I could only kneel with her and try to pray.

I was due in Holland for some large meetings. I had arranged to travel that very night. She would not hear of my remaining at home for her sake. Never shall I forget starting out that evening, with the mournful tidings weighing like lead upon my heart. Oh! the conflict of that night journey! I faced two large congregations [that day] and did my best, although it seemed I spoke as one in a dream. Leaving the meetings to be continued by others, I returned to London the following evening.

Then followed conferences and controversies interminable as to the course of treatment which it might be wisest to pursue. Her objections to an operation finally triumphed.

And then followed for me the most painful experience of my life. To go home was anguish. To be away was worse. Life became a burden almost too heavy to be borne, until God in a very definite manner visited me and in a measure comforted my heart.

Mrs. Booth continued for a few months more to preach and to speak, and for a still longer period to dictate letters and addresses; but she was doomed, and an atmosphere of death fell upon the Booth household. She tried a remedy called the Mattei treatment, and for some time her pain was alleviated; but the progress of the disease was unmistakable. Then she was prevailed upon to submit to an operation.

“The return to consciousness from the anaesthetics used,” says Commissioner Booth-Tucker, “was followed by a period of intense suffering.”

It was decided in 1889 to move her to Clapton, so that she might be near the sea, for which she had expressed a desire. Thither the General transferred so much of home-life as was left to him, and there, after prolonged suffering, she breathed her last on the 4th October, 1890.


During the period, William Booth laboured with his idea for social reformation. It is quite impossible to exaggerate the torture endured by this profoundly loving and most sensitive man during those two years. He was a strong man, but of those strong men who most desperately cling to the love of their heart.

He loved Bramwell as a son on whom he could lean and whose perfect loyalty and unquestioning affection he knew would never fail him in the work of his life; he loved his daughter Emma with a depth of affection intensified by his admiration for her remarkable abilities and her very beautiful nature; he loved Eva as a daughter quivering with emotion and having something of his own courage and audacity, and bright with a quick intelligence and a smiling wit; he loved all his other children for their sound qualities and because they were his children.

Nevertheless, there was one infinitely nearer, so near that she was almost one with him; and for two years he was doomed to watch the agonizing death of this other self, the agonizing death of one whom he had loved with the romantic passion of youth, with the deepening affection of manhood, and with the increasing tenderness of age; one who waited for him in poverty, had shared poverty and contumely with him in married life, and had encouraged him in every fight he had ever waged against clerical narrowness, professional calumny, and the apathy of the world; not only encouraged him, but actually fought at his side and in many contests with even greater power than his own.

Whatever may be urged against William Booth’s methods of propaganda, and whatever defects may be pointed out in his character or his intellect, this at least is a fact beyond question and cavil, that his love story is one of the noblest documents in human history. The perfectly pure and the perfectly faithful love of this despotic man, ‘with its infinite tenderness as its supreme beauty, and with its proudful delight in the object of its worship and devotion as its most charming characteristic, shines through his fierce, tempestuous, and plangent life of action, like an unflickering light upon a quiet altar.

When we remember the pressing poverty of their early life, the indifferent health of the man, and the tremendous and exhausting labours which consumed him; when we consider, too, that with the breaking of Catherine Booth’s health the home lost much of its restfulness, everything sacrificed to the bitterly opposed and cruelly libelled Army, it is impossible not to pay homage to this exquisite devotion which only gathered more beauty and tenderness as the years advanced.


To write a book, amidst all his other labours, during the two years of watching at his wife’s death-bed was at once the burden and the blessing of William Booth. For some hours it distracted his thoughts from the fixed centre of their distress, and for some hours, reading his pages to his wife, and telling her about his manifold schemes, he was almost unconscious of the dark angel in the room. But there were days when to work out difficult schemes, to frame sentences, and to argue his thesis on paper, seemed to him in the presence of the dark angel so callous as to he almost a treason to the beloved. On these occasions he flung his work aside and refused even to think about it.

The papers became chaotic. In the meantime the Shelter and Food Depots which he had set up in 1888 were besieged by crowds of the homeless whom he could not house and of the hungry whom he could not feed. During the 1889 experiments the Salvation Army sold, among other things, to these miserable human beings in London alone 192 1/2 tons of bread and 140 tons of potatoes. The work was already on a great scale; it was solving at least a fraction of the vaster problem; and money was essential.

In these circumstances William Booth was prevailed upon to call in Mr. W. T. Stead, and that brilliant journalist, whose admiration for Mrs. Booth was one of the truest and steadiest facts of his life, after listening to the scheme and examining the manuscript, gave himself with enthusiasm to the task, taking away the disordered papers of William Booth, and converting them into a broad-margined manuscript which Booth himself could work upon with a feeling of comfort.

To Mr. Stead, whose anonymous services are acknowledged in the Preface, the world owes, then, no small part of the debt for this epoch-making book — a book which has powerfully influenced legislative and religious activity ever since. At the same time it is permissible to say that the book as a piece of literature would have been surer of immortality had it been written from the first page to the last in the vigorous, direct, unpolished, but wonderfully dynamic vernacular of William Booth.

It is quite possible to see where Booth breaks in upon the well-ordered and elaborate sentences with a stroke of his own, and excellent as Mr. Stead’s work may be, those strokes in the midst of it are like a door blowing suddenly open, or like a human voice shouting great news above the murmur of bees. It is as if a sermon by Bossuet contained every now and then an exclamation by Bunyan.

In these trying circumstances, then, and by this not very well-matched conjunction, the book came to be written. We shall now proceed to summarize its argument.

Chapter 8

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