"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?'