Authoritative Life of General William Booth — Tributes, Part 2

The Daily Telegraph, _August 21, 1912_ "It is with no ordinary or conventional regret that we record this morning the death of General Booth.

The news will be received by hundreds of thousands of Salvationists with profound and reverential grief, and by many who are not Salvationists, and who never could be, with respectful and sympathetic sorrow.

For, whatever we may think of William Booth and of the wonderful Organisation which he so triumphantly established, it is certain that he belonged to the company of saints, and that during the eighty-three years of a strenuous life, he devoted himself, so far as in him lay, to the solemn duty of saving men's souls and extending the Divine Kingdom on earth.

That success attended his efforts is, from this point of view, not of so much consequence as that the success was deserved by the patient, devout, and self-sacrificing zeal of the Founder of The Salvation Army.

Long ago William Booth prevailed against the easy scepticism of those who found fault with his aims, and the sincere dislike of humble and reverent men, who doubted whether the cause of religion could be advanced by such riotous methods.

Not only was The General of The Salvation Army a saint and a mystic, who lived in this world and yet was not of this world, but he also was possessed of much practical ability and common sense, without which the great work of his life could never have been accomplished.

We need only refer to that remarkable book which he published in 1890, _In Darkest England, and the Way Out_, in which will be found proposals to remedy the crying evils of pauperism and vice by such eminently wise expedients as Farm Colonies, Oversea Colonies, and Rescue Homes for Fallen Women;

to say nothing of picturesque but also practical devices, such as the Prison-Gate Brigade, the Poor Man's Bank, the Poor Man's Lawyer, and Whitechapel-by-the-Sea.

How is it possible to ridicule the objects or character of a man who has proved himself so earnest a worker for God?

As a matter of fact, William Booth was nothing less than a genius, and towards the end of the nineteenth century the world at large gave very generous recognition, not only to the spirit and temper, but to the results of an extraordinarily effective, and, indeed, epoch-making Movement.

At the instance of King Edward VII The General was officially invited to be present at the Coronation ceremony in 1902. Nothing could have marked more significantly than this single fact the completeness of the change of public feeling; and when, in 1905, William Booth went on a progress through England, he was welcomed in state by the Mayors and Corporations of many towns.

"Is it better to live in this world with no religion at all or with a narrow and violent form of religious belief?

People will judge the deceased teacher and chief, in respect of his theological and propagandist work, in accordance with the views which they hold upon this alternative.

As regards his social labours, his passionate efforts to help the 'submerged tenth,' his widespread helpfulness of the poor, his shelters and refuges, the feeling must and will be almost universal that he was an energetic and warm-hearted benefactor of his kind, who wrought much good to his times, and helped others to do it, and who had what Sir John Seeley called the 'enthusiasm of humanity' in very honourable, if noisy and demonstrative, form.

But, since The General mingled all this with a cult--a distinct theological teaching, a theory of the Divine government and destiny of mankind which was in external form, as Huxley styled it, 'Corybantic'--the question does and must arise whether religion of the Salvationist school does good or harm to the human natures which it addresses.

It is not necessary to dwell upon the dislike--we might, indeed, say the repulsion--felt by serious and elevated minds at the paraphernalia, the pious turmoil, the uproar and 'banalite' of much that has developed under the Banners of The Salvation Army.

Prayers uttered like volley-firing, hymns roared to the roll of drums and the screaming of fifes, have been features of this remarkable revival which outraged many of the orthodox, and made even the judicious and indulgent ask whether any good could come out of such a Nazareth.

Nobody gave utterance to this feeling with greater moderation or kindliness than Cardinal Manning, when, while confessing that the need of spiritual awakening among the English poor was only too well proved by the success of General Booth--that the moral and religious state of East London could alone have rendered possible The Salvation Army--his Eminence added these grave sentences: 'Low words generate low thoughts;

words without reverence destroy the veneration of the human mind.

When a man ceases to venerate he ceases to worship.

Extravagance, exaggeration, and coarseness are dangers incident to all popular teachers, and these things pass easily into a strain which shocks the moral sense and deadens the instinct of piety.

Familiarity with God in men of chastened mind produces a more profound veneration; in unchastened minds it runs easily into an irreverence which borders upon impiety.

Even the Seraphim cover their faces in the Divine Presence.'

"Yet against what new movement of spiritual awakening in the people--against what form of religious revival might not the same argument of offended culture and decorous holiness be employed?

And where would the lower masses of men be to-day if Religion had not stooped out of her celestial heights--from the first chapters of Christendom until the last--to the intellectual and moral levels of the poor and lowly?

In the sheet, knit at four corners, and lowered out of Heaven, there was nothing common or unclean.

If, as is practically certain, General Booth, by the vast association which he founded and organised, touched with the sense of higher and immortal things countless humble and unenlightened souls; if, in his way, and in their way, he brought home to them the love and power of Heaven, and the duty and destiny of men, then it is not for refined persons who keep aloof from such vulgar tasks to mock at the life and deeds of this remarkable man.

The particulars which we give elsewhere of his career show how, like Wesley, Whitefield, and Spurgeon, in this country, and like Savonarola, Peter the Hermit, and the Safi mystics abroad, William Booth, the builder's son of Nottingham, was obviously set apart, and summoned by time, temperament, and circumstances for the labours of his life.

Like Luther, his answer to all objections--worldly or unworldly--would always have been, 'I can no other'.

Meeting in Miss Catherine Mumford the wife who exactly suited him, and reinforced by many children, all brought up in the temper and vocation of their parents, The General made his family a sort of Headquarters' Staff of The Salvation Army, and celebrated his household marriages or bewept his domestic bereavements with all the éclat and effect of œcumenical events.

We saw him buy up and turn into stations for his troops such places as the 'Eagle Tavern' and 'Grecian Theatre,' overcome popular rioting at Bath, Guilford, Eastbourne, and elsewhere; fill the United Kingdom with his _War Cry_ and his fighting centres, and invade all Europe, and even the Far East.

At home he plunged, insatiable of moral and social conquests, into his crusade for 'Darkest England,' being powerful enough to raise in less than a month as much as all England and the Colonies contributed for the Gordon College at Khartoum in response to another victorious general.

For General Booth certainly ended by being victorious.

If the evangelical creed he inculcated was rude, crude, and unideal, it was serious, sincere, and stimulating.

He waged war against the Devil, as that mysterious personage was understood by him, with the most whole-hearted and relentless zeal.

He enjoined, let it be remembered, an absolute temperance, soberness, and chastity upon the Officers and rank and file of his motley host; and, ugly as some may think the uniforms of Salvationists, the police and magistrates know that they cover for the most part honest hearts.

Could The General have affected all this--or a tenth part of it--if he had not lent himself to the eternal necessities and weaknesses of the uneducated, and given them his drill, his banners, his drums, his prayer-volleys, his poke-bonnets, and his military tunics?

We doubt it, and in contemplating, therefore, the enormous good this dead man did, and sought to do, and the neglected fields of humanity which he tilled for the Common Master, we judge him to be one of the chief and most serviceable figures of the Victorian age; and well deserving from his own followers the ecstasy of grief and veneration which is being manifested, and from contemporary notice the tribute of a hearty recognition of pious and noble objects zealously pursued, and love of God and of humanity made the passion and the purpose of a whole unflinching life."

Daily Chronicle, _August 22, 1912_ By Harold Begbie "Scarcely could you find a country in the whole world where men and women are not now grieving for the death of General Booth.

Among peoples of whom we have never heard, and in languages of which we do not know even the alphabet, this universal grief ascends to Heaven--perhaps the most universal grief ever known in the history of mankind.

"One realises something of the old man's achievement by reflecting on this universal grief.

It will not do to dismiss him lightly.

More, it will not do to express a casual admiration of his character, an indulgent approbation of his work.

The man was unique.

In some ways he was the superman of his period.

Never before has a man in his own lifetime won so wide a measure of deep and passionate human affection.

"It will not do to say that by adopting vulgar methods and appealing to vulgar people, General Booth established his universal kingdom of emotional religion.

Let the person inclined to think in this way dress himself in fantastic garments, take a drum, and march through the streets shouting 'Hallelujah.'

There is no shorter cut to humility.

Many have tried to do what William Booth did.

Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken drugged humanity and render the Kingdom of Heaven a reality.

Many men have broken their hearts in the effort to save the Christian religion from the paralysis of formalism and the sleeping sickness of philosophy.

It is not an easy thing to revivify a religion, nor a small thing to rescue many thousands of the human race from sin and misery.

"Let us be generous and acknowledge, now that it is too late to cheer his heart, that General Booth accomplished a work quite wonderful and quite splendid, a work unique in the records of the human race.

Let us be frank and say that we ourselves could have done nothing like it.

Let us forget our intellectual superiority, and, instead of criticising, endeavour to see as it stands before us, and as it really is, the immense marvel of his achievement.

Our canons of taste, our notions of propriety, will change and cease to be.

The saved souls of humanity will persist for ever.

"I remember very well my first impression of General Booth.

I was young;

I knew little of the sorrow of existence; I was perfectly satisfied with the traditions I had inherited from my ancestors; I was disposed to regard originality as affectation, and great earnestness as a sign of fanaticism.

In this mood I sat and talked with General Booth, measured him, judged him, and had the audacity to express in print my opinion about him--my opinion of this huge giant, this Moses of modern times.

He offended me.

The tone of his voice grated on my ears.

His manner to a servant who waited upon him seemed harsh and irritable.

I found it impossible to believe that his acquaintance with spirituality was either intimate or real.

Saints ought to be gentlemen.

He seemed to me a vulgar old man, a clumsy old humourist, an intolerant, fanatical, one idea'd Hebraist.

"Later in my life I met him on several occasions, and at each meeting with him I saw something fresh to admire, something new to love.

I think that he himself altered as life advanced; but the main change, of course, was in myself--I was able to see him with truer vision, because I was less sure of my own value to the cosmos, and more interested to discover the value of other men.

And I was learning to know the sorrows of the world.

"There is one very common illusion concerning General Booth.

The vulgar sneers are forgotten; the scandalous slander that he was a self-seeking charlatan is now ashamed to utter itself except in vile quarters; but men still say--so anxious are they to escape from the miracle, so determined to account for every great thing by little reasons--that his success as revivalist lay only in his powers as an organiser.

Now, nothing is further from the truth.

General Booth was not a great organiser, not even a great showman.

He would have ruined any business entrusted to his management.

He would long ago have ruined the organisation of The Salvation Army if his life had been spent on that side of its operations.

Far from being the hard, shrewd, calculating, and statesmanlike genius of The Army's machinery, General Booth has always been its heart and soul, its dreamer and its inspiration.

The brains of The Army are to be looked for elsewhere.

Bramwell Booth is the man of affairs.

Bramwell Booth is the master-mind directing all those world-wide activities.

And but for Bramwell Booth The Salvation Army as it now exists, a vast catholic Organisation, would be unknown to mankind.

"General Booth's secret, so far as one may speak about it at all, lay in his perfectly beautiful and most passionate sympathy with suffering and pain.

I have met only one other man in my life who so powerfully realised the sorrows of other people.

Because General Booth realised these sorrows so very truly and so very actually, he was able to communicate his burning desire for radical reformation to other people.

The contagiousness of his enthusiasm was the obvious cause of his extraordinary success, but the hidden cause of this enthusiasm was the living, breathing, heart-beating reality of his sympathy with sorrow.

When he spoke to one of the sufferings endured by the children of a drunkard, for instance, it was manifest that he himself felt the very tortures and agonies of those unhappy children--really felt them, really endured them.

His face showed it.

There was no break in the voice, no pious exclamation, no gesture in the least theatrical or sentimental.

One saw in the man's face that he was enduring pain, that the thought was so real to him that he himself actually suffered, and suffered acutely.

If we had imagination enough to feel as he felt the dreadful fears and awful deprivation of little children in the godless slums of great cities, we, too, should rush out from our comfortable ease to raise Salvation Armies.

It would be torture to sit still.

It would be impossible to do nothing.

"This wonderful old man suffered all his life as few have ever suffered.

And his suffering arose from the tremendous power of his imagination.

At a Meeting he would tell amusing stories, and in the company of several people he would talk with a gaiety that deceived; but with one or two, deeply interested to know why he was a Salvationist, and what he really thought about life, he would open his heart, and show one at least something of its agony.

He was afflicted by the sins of the whole world.

They hurt him, tore him, wounded him, and broke his heart.

He did not merely know that people suffer from starvation; that children run to hide under a bed at the first sound of a drunken parent's step on the stair; that thousands of women are friendless and defaced on the streets; that thousands of boys go to their bodily and spiritual ruin only for want of a little natural parental care; that men and women are locked up like wild beasts in prison who would be good parents and law-abiding citizens were love allowed to enter and plead with them--he did not merely know these things, but he visualised and felt in his own person the actual tortures of all these perishing creatures.

He wept for them.

He prayed for them.

Sometimes he would not sleep for thinking of them.

"I have seen him with suffering face and extended arms walk up and down his room, crying out from the depths of his heart: 'Oh, those poor people, those poor people!

--the sad, wretched women, the little, trembling frightened children meant to be so happy!

--all cursed with sin, cursed and crushed and tortured by sin!'

And he would then open his arms as if to embrace the whole world, and exclaim, 'Why won't they let us save them?'

--meaning, 'Why won't society and the State let The Salvation Army save them?'

"His attitude towards suffering and sorrow was, nevertheless, harder in many ways than that of certain humanitarians.

He believed in a Devil, he believed in Hell, and he believed in the saying that there are those who would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead.

And so he held it the wisdom of statesmanship that when all men have been given a fair opportunity for repentance, and after love has done everything in its power to save and convert the lawless and bad, those who will not accept Salvation should be punished with all the force of a civilisation that must needs defend itself.

The word punishment was very often on his lips.

I think that he believed in the value of punishment almost as profoundly as he believed in the value of love.

He believed that love could save the very worst man and the very worst woman in the world who wanted to be saved; and he also believed that nothing was so just and wise as rigorous punishment for the unrighteous who would not be saved.

I think that he would have set up in England, if he had enjoyed the power which we give to politicians, two classes of prison--the reforming prison, controlled only by compassionate Christians who believe in love;

and the punishing prison, which isolates the evil and iniquitous from contact with innocence and struggling virtue.

In that direction this most merciful man was merciless.

"Why he became a Salvationist is very clear.

He knew that the centre of life is the heart.

He saw that all efforts of statesmanship to alter the conditions of existence must be fruitless, or, at any rate, that the harvest must be in the far distant future of humanity, while the heart of man remains unchanged.

He suspected the mere respectability which satisfies so many reformers.

Even virtue seemed to him second-rate and perilous.

He was not satisfied with abstention from sin, or with the change from slum to model lodging-house.

He held that no man is safe, no man is at the top of his being, no man is fully conscious of life's tremendous greatness until the heart is definitely and rejoicingly given to God.

He was like St. Augustine, like Coleridge, and all the supreme saints of the world in this insistence upon the necessity for a cleansed heart and a will devoted to the glory of God; he was different from them all in believing that this message must be shouted, dinned, trumpeted, and drummed into the ears of the world before mankind can awaken to its truth.

"He made a tremendous demand.

Towards the end of his life he sometimes wondered, very sadly and pitifully, whether he had not asked too much of his followers.

I think, to mention only one particular, that he was wavering as to his ban upon tobacco.

He was so certain of the happiness and joy which come from Salvation, that he had no patience with the trivial weaknesses of human flesh, which do not really matter.

Let us remember that he had seen thousands of men and women all over the world literally transformed by his method from the most miserable animals into radiant and intelligent creatures conscious of immortality and filled with the spirit of unselfish devotion to humanity.

Is it to be wondered at that The General of this enormous Army should scarcely doubt the wisdom of his first terms of service?

"But towards the end he suffered greatly in his own personal life, and suffering loosens the rigidity of the mind.

Those of his own household broke away from him, the dearest of his children died, trusted Officers forsook him, some of those whose sins he had forgiven again and again deserted his Flag, and whispered scandal and tittle-tattle into the ears of degraded journalism.

He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners.

Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable.

But he became more human and more lovable in these last years of distress.

"We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of self-congratulation.

It is not often true.

A well-known millionaire told me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother's cottage carrying to her in a tight-clenched fist his first week's wage--a sixpenny bit.

Mr. Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to dream of his romantic life.

'I haven't time,' he said; 'the present is too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.'

Mr. Chamberlain in the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing.

Perhaps we may say that men of action never look back.

And so it was with General Booth.

He might well have rested during these last few years in a large and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement, and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction.

Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are full of happiness and delight.

But this old, rough-tongued, weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The Salvation Army--he who could see all this, and who could justly say, 'But for me these things had never been,' was not happy and was not satisfied.

He ached and groaned to save all such as are sorrowful.

"In the last letter he ever wrote to me, a letter that broke off pitifully, because of his blindness, from the big, bold, challenging handwriting, and became a dictated typewritten letter, occurred the words, 'I am distressed.'

He was chiefly distressed by the over-devotion most of us pay to politics and philosophy, by the struggle for wages, by the clash between master and man, by the frivolity of the rich, the stupor of the poor, by the blindness of the whole world to the necessity for the cleansed heart.

He did not want to establish a Salvation Army, but to save the whole world.

He did not want to be acclaimed by many nations, but to see suffering and poverty and squalor clean banished from the earth.

And he believed that with the power of the State at his back, and with the wealth now squandered in a hundred abortive directions in his hands, he could have given us a glad and unashamed England even in a few years.

He knew this and believed it with all his heart.

And he held that his dictatorship would have hurt no just man.

He suffered because poverty continues and thousands are still unhappy.

For such men this world can never suffice.

They create eternity.

"Others may criticise him.

And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule.

For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year grows more potent for social good; who was so tender and affectionate and cordial, and who felt for suffering and sorrow and unhappiness wherever he found it with a heart entirely selfless and absolutely pure.

"Even if The Salvation Army disappeared from every land where it is now at work--and, though it will not disappear, I anticipate during the next ten years many changes in its organisation--to the end of time the spirit of William Booth will be part of our religious progress.

We cannot unthink ourselves out of his realism, out of his boundless pity, out of his consuming earnestness.

He has taught us all to know that the very bad man can be changed into the very good man, and he has brought us back, albeit by a violent method, to the first simple and absolute principles of the only faith which purifies and exalts humanity.