"His attitude towards suffering and sorrow was, nevertheless, harder in many ways than that of certain humanitarians. He believed in a Devil, he believed in Hell, and he believed in the saying that there are those who would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead. And so he held it the wisdom of statesmanship that when all men have been given a fair opportunity for repentance, and after love has done everything in its power to save and convert the lawless and bad, those who will not accept Salvation should be punished with all the force of a civilisation that must needs defend itself. The word punishment was very often on his lips. I think that he believed in the value of punishment almost as profoundly as he believed in the value of love. He believed that love could save the very worst man and the very worst woman in the world who wanted to be saved; and he also believed that nothing was so just and wise as rigorous punishment for the unrighteous who would not be saved. I think that he would have set up in England, if he had enjoyed the power which we give to politicians, two classes of prison--the reforming prison, controlled only by compassionate Christians who believe in love; and the punishing prison, which isolates the evil and iniquitous from contact with innocence and struggling virtue. In that direction this most merciful man was merciless.
"Why he became a Salvationist is very clear. He knew that the centre of life is the heart. He saw that all efforts of statesmanship to alter the conditions of existence must be fruitless, or, at any rate, that the harvest must be in the far distant future of humanity, while the heart of man remains unchanged. He suspected the mere respectability which satisfies so many reformers. Even virtue seemed to him second-rate and perilous. He was not satisfied with abstention from sin, or with the change from slum to model lodging-house. He held that no man is safe, no man is at the top of his being, no man is fully conscious of life's tremendous greatness until the heart is definitely and rejoicingly given to God. He was like St. Augustine, like Coleridge, and all the supreme saints of the world in this insistence upon the necessity for a cleansed heart and a will devoted to the glory of God; he was different from them all in believing that this message must be shouted, dinned, trumpeted, and drummed into the ears of the world before mankind can awaken to its truth.
"He made a tremendous demand. Towards the end of his life he sometimes wondered, very sadly and pitifully, whether he had not asked too much of his followers. I think, to mention only one particular, that he was wavering as to his ban upon tobacco. He was so certain of the happiness and joy which come from Salvation, that he had no patience with the trivial weaknesses of human flesh, which do not really matter. Let us remember that he had seen thousands of men and women all over the world literally transformed by his method from the most miserable animals into radiant and intelligent creatures conscious of immortality and filled with the spirit of unselfish devotion to humanity. Is it to be wondered at that The General of this enormous Army should scarcely doubt the wisdom of his first terms of service?
"But towards the end he suffered greatly in his own personal life, and suffering loosens the rigidity of the mind. Those of his own household broke away from him, the dearest of his children died, trusted Officers forsook him, some of those whose sins he had forgiven again and again deserted his Flag, and whispered scandal and tittle-tattle into the ears of degraded journalism. He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in these last years of distress.
"We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of self-congratulation. It is not often true. A well-known millionaire told me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother's cottage carrying to her in a tight-clenched fist his first week's wage--a sixpenny bit. Mr. Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to dream of his romantic life. 'I haven't time,' he said; 'the present is too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.' Mr. Chamberlain in the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing. Perhaps we may say that men of action never look back. And so it was with General Booth. He might well have rested during these last few years in a large and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement, and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction. Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are full of happiness and delight. But this old, rough-tongued, weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The Salvation Army--he who could see all this, and who could justly say, 'But for me these things had never been,' was not happy and was not satisfied. He ached and groaned to save all such as are sorrowful.
"In the last letter he ever wrote to me, a letter that broke off pitifully, because of his blindness, from the big, bold, challenging handwriting, and became a dictated typewritten letter, occurred the words, 'I am distressed.' He was chiefly distressed by the over-devotion most of us pay to politics and philosophy, by the struggle for wages, by the clash between master and man, by the frivolity of the rich, the stupor of the poor, by the blindness of the whole world to the necessity for the cleansed heart. He did not want to establish a Salvation Army, but to save the whole world. He did not want to be acclaimed by many nations, but to see suffering and poverty and squalor clean banished from the earth. And he believed that with the power of the State at his back, and with the wealth now squandered in a hundred abortive directions in his hands, he could have given us a glad and unashamed England even in a few years. He knew this and believed it with all his heart. And he held that his dictatorship would have hurt no just man. He suffered because poverty continues and thousands are still unhappy. For such men this world can never suffice. They create eternity.
"Others may criticise him. And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year grows more potent for social good; who was so tender and affectionate and cordial, and who felt for suffering and sorrow and unhappiness wherever he found it with a heart entirely selfless and absolutely pure.
"Even if The Salvation Army disappeared from every land where it is now at work--and, though it will not disappear, I anticipate during the next ten years many changes in its organisation--to the end of time the spirit of William Booth will be part of our religious progress. We cannot unthink ourselves out of his realism, out of his boundless pity, out of his consuming earnestness. He has taught us all to know that the very bad man can be changed into the very good man, and he has brought us back, albeit by a violent method, to the first simple and absolute principles of the only faith which purifies and exalts humanity.
"When the dust has blown away, we shall see him as perhaps the greatest of our time."
The Post of Berlin