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that I and my people are not wishful to find fault with any religious body whatever, but to spend all our time and energy in combating the great evils of godlessness and selfishness which threaten to sweep away all the people everywhere from any thought above material things.

      "Yet we have had to forbid our people to accept too often the pressing invitations that pour upon them from all sides to hold Meetings in Church buildings, lest they should lose touch with the masses outside, and begin to be content with audiences of admirers.

      "The thirty-six years of my life whilst I was groping about in vain for a home and fellowship amongst Churches gave me to understand, as only experience can, what are the thoughts and feelings of the millions in Christian lands, who not only never enter a church, but who feel it to be inconceivable that they ever should do so.

      "If this experience has been invaluable to us in Christian lands, how much more so is it in the far vaster countries of Asia and Africa, where our work is only as yet in its beginnings. When I went to Japan, the entire missionary community everywhere united to uphold me as the exemplar of true Christlike action for the good of all men. But the leaders of all the five sects of Buddhism were no less unanimous in their welcome to me, or in their expressions of prayerful desire for the success of my work.

      "In India and Africa I have repeatedly seen supporting me in my indoor and outdoor demonstrations the leaders of the Hindu, Parsee, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, and Mohammedan communities, who had never met with the Christians in so friendly a way before. I cannot think this would have been the case had I ever become settled amongst any Christian body in this country.

      "Can any one wonder then that I see in all the unpleasant experiences of my early days the hand of God Himself, leading me by a way that I knew not--that I could scarcely believe indeed at the time to be His way. Why should it have been so difficult for a man, who only wished to lead the lost ones to the great Shepherd who seeks them all to get or to remain within any existing fold, if it was not that there lay before me and my Soldiers conquests infinitely greater and more important than had ever yet been made?

      "Oh, with what impatience I turn from the very thought of any of the squabbles of Christian sects when I see all around me the millions who want to avoid any thought of their great Friend and Father, and of the coming Judge before whom we must all, perhaps this very day, appear."

      How easily excuses, which sound most plausible, are found for every sort of negligence in the service of God--indeed, for not serving Him at all!

      "It is not my way, you see," says some one, who does not like to make any open profession of interest in Jesus Christ, as though our own preferences or opinions were to be the governing consideration in all that affects the interests of "our Lord"!

      The General has proved that the old ideas connected with "the Master" can not only be revived but acted up to in our day, and the sense of shame for idle excuses drive out all the paltry pleas set up for indifference to the general ruin.

      "At this season, nothing can be done" is as coolly pleaded to-day as if "in season, out of season" had never been written in our Divine Order-Book.

      How often our forces in the midst of fairs, and race-days, and "slack times," have demonstrated that real soldiers of Christ can snatch victory, just when all around seems to ensure their defeat!

      When The General began to form his Army, it was ordinarily assumed as a settled principle that Open-Air Work could only be done in fine weather, and the theory is still existent in many quarters. As if the comfort and convenience of "the workers," and not the danger and misery of the people, were to fix the times of such effort!

      "But the people will not come," is even now pleaded as an excuse for the omission or abandonment of any imaginable attempt to do good. As if the people's general disinclination for anything that has to do with God were not the precise reason for His wish to "send out" His servants!

      "Such a plan would never succeed here," is an almost invariable excuse made for not undertaking anything new. The General was never blind to differences between this and that locality and population. But he insisted that no plan that could be devised by those on any given spot, and especially no plan that has manifestly been blessed and used by God elsewhere should be dismissed without proper, earnest trial.

      "But that has never been done, or has never done well here," seemed to him rather a reason for trying it with, perhaps, some little modification than for leaving a plan untried. The inexorable law to which he insisted that everything should bend was that nothing can excuse inactivity and want of enterprise where souls are perishing. And he was spared to see even Governments beginning to recognise that it is inexcusable to let sin triumph in "a Christian country." He proved that it was possible to raise up "Christian Soldiers," who would not only sing, or hear singing, in beautiful melody about "Marching, onward as to War"; but who would really do it, even when, it led to real battle.

      Chapter VII

       Table of Contents

East London Beginning

       Table of Contents

      What were Mr. and Mrs. Booth to do? They were excluded from most of the Churches in which during the last twenty years they had led so many souls to Christ. They found themselves out of harmony with most of the undenominational evangelists of the day, and, moreover, they had experienced throughout even the brightest of their past years a gnawing dissatisfaction with much of their work, which The General thus described in the preface to his book, In Darkest England, and the Way Out:--

      "All the way through my career I have keenly felt the remedial measures usually enumerated in Christian programmes, and ordinarily employed by Christian philanthropy, to be lamentably inadequate for any effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of the outcast classes. The rescued are appallingly few, a ghastly minority compared with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss. Alike, therefore, my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of them as in any way separate from each other, have cried out for some comprehensive method of reaching and saving the perishing crowds."

      The Booths had settled in a London home, finding that they must needs have some fixed resting-place for their children, and that abundant opportunities of one kind or another could be found for them both in the metropolis. But The General, who was "waiting upon God, and wondering what would happen" to open his way to the unchurched masses, received an invitation to undertake some services in a tent which had been erected in an old burial-ground in Whitechapel, the expected missioner having fallen ill! He consented, and he thus describes his experiences:--

      "When I saw those masses of poor people, so many of them evidently without God or hope in the world, and found that they so readily and eagerly listened to me, following from Open-Air Meeting to tent, and accepting, in many instances, my invitation to kneel at the Saviour's feet there and then, my whole heart went out to them. I walked back to our West-End home and said to my wife:--

      "'O Kate, I have found my destiny! These are the people for whose Salvation I have been longing all these years. As I passed by the doors of the flaming gin-palaces to-night I seemed to hear a voice sounding in my ears, "Where can you go and find such heathen as these, and where is there so great a need for your labours?" And there and then in my soul I offered myself and you and the children up to this great work. Those people shall be our people, and they shall have our God for their God.'"

      Mrs. Booth herself wrote:--

      "I remember the emotion that this produced in my soul. I sat gazing into the fire, and the Devil whispered to me, 'This means another departure, another start in life!' The question of our support constituted a serious difficulty. Hitherto we had been able to meet our expenses out of the collections which we had made from our more respectable audiences. But it was impossible to suppose that we could do so among the poverty-stricken

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