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astonished to hear that it was proposed to appoint him as Superintendent of a London Circuit. He was able to persuade the authorities concerned to alter this intention on the ground of his comparative lack of experience, although he expressed his willingness to take the post of assistant minister under whomsoever the Conference might appoint as Superintendent.

      In due course, the appointment was made, and he found himself assistant to a Superintendent who, he tells us, was "stiff, hard, and cold, making up, in part, for the want of heart and thought in his public performances by what sounded like a sanctimonious wail."

      This gentleman strongly objected when, as a result of the reports of Mr. Booth's services appearing in the Press, he was urgently invited to visit other places, as he had visited Guernsey. The Conference authorities, however, prevailed, and insisted, in the general interest, upon his place in London being taken by another preacher, and his services being utilised wherever called for.

      It was thus by no choice of his own, but by the arrangement of his Church, that Mr. Booth, instead of remaining tied down to the ordinary routine of pastoral life, was sent for some time from place to place to conduct such evangelising Campaigns as his soul delighted in. Who can doubt that God's hand was in this disposal of his time? He was allowed to marry, though his young wife had to content herself with but occasional brief spells of association with him.

      His Campaigns were really wonderful in their success. He would go for a fortnight, or even less, to some city where the congregation had dwindled almost to nothing, and where one or two services a week, conducted in a very quiet and formal way, were maintained with difficulty, owing to the indifference or hopelessness of both minister and people. For the period of his stay all the usual programme would be laid aside, however, and he would be left free to carry out his own plans of daily service.

      How remarkable to find him so completely carrying with him all who had been accustomed to the old forms, and introducing, with the evident sanction of the president and authorities of his Church, such re-arrangements, records, and reorganisation as he desired.

      But the strange, the almost inexplicable thing is that, without his even remarking upon it, all should go back to the old forms the moment his Campaign ended!

      What is not at all strange is that there should have grown up within the Church a strong opposition to him, so that, at the end of two and a half years, a majority of the Conference voted against his continuing these Campaigns, and required him to resume the ordinary routine of the ministry. Surely, any one might have foreseen that unless the old forms could be altered in favour of the new régime, the leader of this warfare must submit to the old routine. True, he might try to carry out in his Circuit, to the utmost of his power, his ideas of free and daily warfare; but, unless all who were under him in the various places which constituted a Methodist Circuit would constantly agree and co-operate, no one man could prevent the old forms from prevailing.

      But William Booth was no revolutionist, and his willingness and submission to carry on the old routine, with little alteration, for four successive years surely proved that no desire for personal exaltation or mastery, but only the conquest of souls, was his guiding influence.

      In those four years, spent in Brighouse and Gateshead, he tried to introduce into the churches as much as he could of the life of warfare which he considered necessary. In one year he so far won over the officialdom of Brighouse that they desired his reappointment; whilst in Gateshead he so transformed the Circuit that before many weeks had passed the Central Chapel, which had hitherto borne the dignified but cool-sounding name of "Bethesda," was dubbed by the mechanics, who formed the bulk of the surrounding population, "The Converting Shop."

      To those iron workers, accustomed daily to see masses of metal suddenly changed, whilst in a red-hot state, into any desired form by the action of powerful machinery, set up for the purpose, such a name was both intelligible and expressive.

      It, moreover, accorded with the new pastor's idea of the proper utilisation of any building devoted to the worship of Jesus Christ. There ought to be felt there, he thought, that marvellous heat of Divine Love which was implied in Christ's engagement to "baptise" all His followers "with fire," and the services should above all else, be such as would ensure the immediate conversion to God of all who came under their influence.

      But in Gateshead The General was to discover the most potent force that could be brought to bear upon all these questions, in the liberation of Mrs. Booth from the customary silence which Church system has almost universally imposed upon woman. It might almost be said that the whole problem of cold formality, as against loving warmth, can be solved by woman's liberation. True, in the ordinary state of things, the most excellent ladies of any church become its most conservative bulwarks; and, fortified, as they imagine, by a few words in one of St. Paul's Epistles, such ladies can oppose every new spiritual force as powerfully as some of them opposed him in Antioch, nineteen hundred years ago. But "daughters" of God who have been liberated by His Spirit generally make short work of any continued opposition.

      Mrs. Booth, herself trained and hitherto fettered by this old school of silence, to the astonishment of every one prayed in the church on the first Sunday evening in Gateshead. The opposition of an influential pastor, in a neighbouring city, to the public ministrations of a Mrs. Palmer, a visitor from the United States, very soon afterwards led Mrs. Booth to defend her sister's action in the Press, and thus to see more clearly than before what God could do through her, if she was willing.

      The General had not yet seen the importance of this advance, and, in view of his wife's delicate health, had not pressed her into any sort of activity, much as he had valued her perfect fellowship with him in private. But he rejoiced, of course, in her every forward step, and when she not only visited a street of the most godless and drunken people in the neighbourhood, but began to speak in the services, he gave her all the weight of his official as well as his personal sanction, little imagining at the time what a mighty force for the spread of the truth he was thus enlisting.

      After faithfully serving the Church in Gateshead for three years, he found the Conference no more willing than before to release him for the evangelistic work which now both he and his wife more and more longed for.

      The final scene, when, in a Conference at Liverpool, Mrs. Booth confirmed The General's resolution to refuse to continue even for one more year his submission to form, by calling out "Never!" marked a stage in his career which was decisive in a startling way as to the whole of his future.

      "It is true that I had a wonderful sphere of usefulness and happiness," says The General; "but I was not contented. I had many reasons for dissatisfaction. I was cribbed, cabined, and confined by a body of cold, hard usages, and still colder and harder people. I desired freedom! I felt I was called to a different sphere of labour. I wanted liberty to move forward in it. So when the Conference definitely declined my request to set me free for evangelistic work I bade them farewell.

      "It was a heart-breaking business. Here was a great crowd of people all over the land who loved me and my dear wife. I felt a deep regard for them, and to leave them was a sorrow beyond description. But I felt I must follow what appeared to be the beckoning finger of my Lord. So, with my wife and four little children, I left my quarters and went out into the world once more, trusting in God, literally not knowing who would give me a shilling, or what to do or where to go.

      "All my earthly friends thought I was mistaken in this action; some of them deemed me mad. I confess that it was one of the most perplexing steps of my life. When I took it every avenue seemed closed against me. There was one thing I could do, however, and that was to trust in God, and wait for His Salvation."

      The difficulty of the Church was really insurmountable at that time. Since those days most of the Protestant Churches have learnt that evangelistic work is just as essential as the ordinary pastoral ministrations.

      The fact is, that neither the Booths nor the Church were then aware that God, behind all their perplexities, was working out a plan of His own. Who laments that separation to-day? As the evangelists of any Church they could not possibly have become to so large an extent the evangelists of all.

      Chapter

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