The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army

by George S. Railton

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.