When I first saw him at seventeen, he was still studying; but he had been, during the previous eighteen months of the General's illness and absence, his mother's mainstay in the managing both the public and the office work of "The Christian Mission," and the Secretary and, largely, manager of a set of soup kitchens, the precursors, in some ways, of our present Social Wing. For all this to be possible to a lad of seventeen, of delicate health, may give some little indication of the faculties with which God had endowed him.

It was not, however, till five years later, when he had fully conquered his own taste for a medical career that he gave himself fully to the War. Alone, or with one of his sisters, he visited the towns where many of our largest Corps were being raised, holding Meetings in theatres and other popular resorts, so that he gained first-hand all the experiences of Officers, both in the pioneering days and in the after years of struggle against all manner of difficulty, when every sort of problem as to individuals, and Corps, had to be dealt with from hour to hour.

This much to explain how it was possible for a man so young to become at twenty-five the worthy and capable Chief of the Staff of an Army already at work in both hemispheres and on both sides of the world. The reader will also be able to understand how the Chief, travelling by night as often as by day, could visit the General in the midst of any of his Campaigns, and in the course of a brief journey from city to city, or between night and morning confer fully with him, and take decisions upon matters that could not await even the delay of a mail.

The comfort to The General, as he often testified, of the continual faithful service of this slave of a son was one of the most invaluable forces of his life. Whilst, on the one side we may see in such self-renouncing abandonment a certificate to and evidence of the nature of The General's own life, we must read in it, at the same time, some part of the explanation of his boundless activities and influence.

For the Chief of those days, The General of these, to have gone to and come away from his father's daily scenes of triumph without getting the slightest appetite himself for public displays, or yielding in the slightest to the craving after human support or encouragement, to turn him aside from the humdrum of duty, is one proof of those gracious evidences of God's saving and keeping power with which the history of The Salvation Army abounds.

Chapter XXV

Tributes

The great tribute The General received by the vast assemblies in every country at his Funeral and Memorial services, said far more than any words could have expressed of the extent to which he had become recognised everywhere as a true friend of all who were in need, and of the degree to which he had succeeded in prompting all his Officers and people to act up to that ideal.

The following, a small selection of the most prominent testimonies borne to his life by the Press of various countries, will give some idea of what was thought and felt by his contemporaries about him and his work:--

The Christian World, August 22, 1912