The GOSPEL TRUTH
 LIFE of

WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL

of the SALVATION ARMY

 by

Harold Begbie

1920

In Two Volumes

Volume 1

Chapter 21

 

A LADY LODGER'S ACCOUNT OF THE BOOTHS' HOME LIFE

1865-1867

 

IT is not until the Booths take up their residence in Hackney--where their daughter Eva was born--that we are able to see them with any degree of clearness in the intimacy of domestic life.

One of the ladies who went to lodge with them in 1867 was Miss Jane Short, whose age sits lightly upon her, whose memory is as perfect as the most exacting biographer could wish, and who is happily of a humorous disposition, with no desire in the world to exaggerate the remarkable qualities of her dead friends. Very often as she speaks of the Booth household she breaks into cheerful laughter, recognising as shrewdly as any practical and unimaginative person the eccentricity of that family life. At the same time, her testimony is emphatic to the nobility of the Booths, and to the reality of their passionate religious zeal.

"To tell you the truth," she informed me at our first meeting, "I was terribly afraid of going to live with these dear folk, because I had been so often disappointed, grievously disappointed, in religious people. It seemed to me that the Booths could not possibly be in their home life what they were in their preaching. I thought I should see things and hear things which would distress me; I could not imagine that it was possible for them to live their ideals. You see, I loved them so well that I quite shrank from finding my hero-worship an illusion."

She had first encountered Mrs. Booth at Margate, where the latter was conducting a Mission, and afterwards had attended some of the preachings in the East End of London. Admiration of Mrs. Booth had quickly ripened into friendship, and William Booth had won her liveliest sympathy and her utmost enthusiasm at their first encounter.

"People who say that Mrs. Booth was the greater of the two," declares Miss Short, "do not know what they are talking about. Mrs. Booth was a very able woman, a very persuasive speaker, and a wonderful manager; but the General was a force--he dominated everything. I've never met any one who could compare with him for strength of character. You knew the difference in the house directly he opened the door. You felt his presence in every department of the home life. He was a real master."

"You could never say No to the General!" she laughs. "It was he who decided, not I, that I was to live with them. When he said a thing had to be done, it was done, and quickly, too. We used to call him 'The General' long before there was any Salvation Army. He couldn't bear beating about the bush. Prevarication, like stupidity, exasperated him. Everything had to go like clockwork, but very much faster than time. I always say that he got forty-eight hours' work out of the twenty-four."

And then, laughing quietly to herself, she says, "Of course he was queer. He often used to say to me, 'Sister Jane, the Booths are a queer lot,' and laugh mischievously, for he was often laughing. I've known him suddenly kneel down in the middle of breakfast and give thanks to God because a letter he had opened contained money for the Mission. He'd be tremendously in earnest at one moment, and the next he'd be laughing at himself, saying that he was a queer fellow. He'd change, too, in the twinkling of an eye from gloom and dejection to a contagious hilarity that carried everything before it. He suffered in those days--neuralgia and indigestion; it was often dreadful to see how the poor man suffered; but he would fling it all off directly there was work to do, or if he had to comfort anybody else, particularly Mrs. Booth. His love for his wife was the most beautiful thing I have ever known. It really was an exquisite thing. You know, perhaps, that Mrs. Booth was a great invalid. Her sufferings, at times, made her irritable and exacting. The least noise on some occasions would almost distract her. Well, it was at such times as these that the love of the General shone out most beautifully. Never once did he say a harsh word, never once did he try rallying her with rough encouragement; no, he would be more courteous and chivalrous than ever; he would make love to her as tenderly and sweetly as if she were his sweetheart; and he would wait upon her, soothe her, and nurse her with a devotion that I have never seen equalled. I don't mean that he himself was never cross and irritable. He was sometimes, in my opinion, a little too stern with the children. But his love for his wife, well, that was quite perfect; and when I look back now I can see very clearly that it was this wonderful and beautiful love for Mrs. Booth which made the greatest impression on my mind. I may forget many other things about them, but I shall never forget the General's love for his wife."

The house in which they now lived, No. 3 Gore Road, Hackney, was one of those detached, double-fronted, family residences which are typical of the London suburbs and therefore characteristic of the English bourgeoisie. With a half-basement, a steep flight of steps to the front door, large plate-glass windows, and a complete carelessness as to architectural style, this big house had every impressive charm which appeals to the middle-class English family. It looked a rich man's dwelling; it was separate from its neighbours; it possessed large living-rooms; and the road in which it lifted up its solid virtues was reputable and uneventful to the point of monotony. It was what people call the house of a substantial man.

The other lodger was Miss Billups, daughter of the rich contractor at Cardiff who had already befriended the Booths' Mission out of a lively gratitude for spiritual blessings. This lady was a trifle exacting, and never perhaps became quite a member of the family. But Miss Short, who was soon known affectionately as Sister Jane, not only, on occasion, shared her bedroom with one of the children, and became a very intimate and beloved member of the family, but worked herself very nearly to death's door in the service of the Mission.

Although the demands of the Mission were enough to disorganize the best-regulated family in the land, there was a steady sense of orderliness in this household. Meals, for instance, were served to the moment, and woe betide the child who came in five minutes late. The General never sat at the head of his table, when Mrs. Booth was present, but always beside her. She carved at dinner, or poured out the tea. The meals were of an extreme simplicity, and a generous rice pudding appeared on the table with every dinner--haunting the minds of the children to this day. Mrs. Booth held that no child need leave the table hungry, however meagre the joint, so long as this rice pudding completed the feast. There were currants in it on special occasions.

Another characteristic of the Booth household was its tidiness. The General hated above everything else, except sin, untidiness, and dirt in every shape and form. His own study was a model of neatness. But he insisted that the same neatness should be observed elsewhere. The chairs were drilled like soldiers. Not an antimacassar was allowed to be out of place. The hearth must be swept continually. Books and toys were never permitted to be "left about."

One of William Booth's good qualities was a meticulous attention to personal cleanliness. Long before the bath was general in English life, he bathed himself every morning in cold water, with a hot bath once a week, and made use of a foot-bath two and three times during the week. He was very scrupulous in the matter of body linen, and though his things might be darned in every direction, they had to be extremely clean. He always wore long woollen stockings reaching above the knee, with old-fashioned garters wound round and round, and he never changed these articles without carefully turning them inside out; in his extreme old age, when he had to be waited upon, he would sometimes blaze into momentary ferocity if his attendant was slovenly in this particular. He was very often shabby, except in the matter of boots, but never slovenly. It is not difficult to see how the sympathies of such a man, to whom dirt was horrible and an evil smell so execrable that it often produced in him a fit of nausea, must have been quickened by the frightful barbarism of the London slums.

It seems to have been essential with him, even from the very beginnings of the Mission in London, that he should break away every now and then and get into the pure air and beautiful surroundings of the country.

"We used to make excursions into the Forest," Miss Short told me, "and those were certainly among the General's happiest days. He was like a schoolboy directly he got away from London, laughing, singing, and joking nearly all the time. But, mind you, he never went away without his Bible in his pocket, and I think he hardly ever passed by a gipsy without speaking to him about his soul. I've heard him say to a man, for instance, cutting short a tale of some kind, 'But what you said was untrue. It was a lie. You ought not to tell lies. Don't you know it's wrong to tell a lie? What does God think of you when you say what isn't true?' And very well I remember that one day we were sitting at the foot of a great tree in the Forest, he with his head on his wife's knee reading the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel, when he suddenly raised his head at the words--Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you--and fixed his eyes upon me, hard and shining, and demanded, 'Do you believe that, Jane Short?--do you believe it--cleansed from all your filthiness?' I remember how that question seemed to flash into the depths of my soul."

This story reminded Miss Short of the General's curtness in religious discussions and in religious meetings. "He was always practical," she said, "and he detested cant. If anybody prayed too long in a meeting, the General would cut him short with a loud 'Amen.' After a particular prayer-meeting, which I very well remember for its marvelous influence on many souls, the General sprang up and said: 'We've been in heaven; now for work.' But cant moved him to fierce anger, even the very semblance of it. A missionary came to him once in those early days and offered his services. The General inquired about his means of existence. and the man replied that he trusted in the Lord. 'Do you trust me, though?' demanded the General; 'come now, speak out; what do you want?' He was a wonderful, very nearly an infallible judge of character; but he was taken in more than once--always, however, by men he had rather questioned from the first."

It may be imagined that a woman so delicate and so constantly engaged as Mrs. Booth had little time for the society of her children. She cut out and made most of their clothes; she heard their prayers, and for some reason she always insisted upon washing their heads; but neither her health nor her engagements, nor perhaps her disposition, allowed her to play with them. Miss Short considers them the most attractive children that ever breathed, declaring that the two chief impressions left upon her mind from those years, are first the wonderful love of William Booth for his wife, and, second, the delightful nature of the children.

"Of course they were odd," she says, smiling, "for, as the General told me, all the Booths are queer; but they were the frankest, purest, sweetest-minded children I ever knew. And the General knew this well, and although he was sterner than most parents are now, and certainly he did often whip where another would have tried gentler methods, still he loved them dearly, particularly Bramwell, who probably came in for more whippings than any of his brothers! And this is quite certain, the children adored their parents. They thought there were no two people in the world who could compare with their father and mother. The favourite game of the little girls in the nursery was a prayer-meeting, and they used to have a penitent-bench where the dolls were made to kneel. Often I have hardly been able to keep from laughing at the sight of a very ragged doll, all the hair gone and a great hole in the head, kneeling at the penitent-bench. Bramwell was the first to show any inclination to depart from the lives of his parents. He wanted to be a surgeon; he would spend hours dissecting the body of a mouse. I remember that he once borrowed a doll from his sister Emma, and cut it open. She burst out crying when she saw the sawdust streaming away from it, and Bramwell exclaimed indignantly, 'Silly child! do you think you can have an operation without blood?'

But religion was the chief characteristic of the children's lives. I can tell you a story which shows how religion entered into their thoughts. My father, who lived at a little distance from the Booths, was a very old-fashioned man, who smoked a churchwarden pipe and drank the general drink of that day, gin and water. One afternoon Ballington Booth paid him a visit, and when my father's back was turned the naughty boy drank up a good deal of the gin and water! Directly he got home, he burst open the door of the room where his father was working, and exclaimed in quite a frenzy of alarm, 'Papa, papa, I've broken my pledge!' It was some time before his agitation could be dispersed. I remember another story, too. When the same child had been naughty, his father said to him: 'Now would you rather that I prayed with you or whipped you?' Of course the child chose prayer. Then the General said, ''We'll see what prayer will do for you; we'll try that first; if it doesn't make you a good boy I shall whip you.' It might not have been a wise thing to say, but the child was sincere, and really did pray to be a good boy."

Mrs. Booth was often unable at this time to bear the noise of the children, and they never played downstairs when she had retired. But William Booth made it a rule, so far as his engagements would allow, to give to them a part of his evenings at home, and the children would come charging into the room for a romp with their father. There was no set game, so far as I can discover, although "Fox and Geese" was a favourite, but a scrimmage of some kind was the usual amusement. William Booth would lie full length upon the floor, and the smaller children had to try and pull him up. He loved to be tousled; like other men of whom we have heard, he delighted in having his hair ruffled and his head scratched; he would sit reading a book with complete absorption, while one of his children sat upon the arm of his chair rubbing his head.

"One evening," says Miss Jane Short, "his daughter Emma, then about six, amused herself by putting his long hair into curl papers. She worked away until the whole head of the General was covered with little twists of paper--such a sight you never saw in your life, And when she had finished her work, the door opened and a servant entered announcing a visitor. Up sprang the General, and was all but in the hall when the children flung themselves upon his coat-tails and dragged him back, screaming with laughter. You can fancy that when the General looked in the glass he laughed too.

"By the way, I always think it is a good test of a man's character to know what his servants think of him; and certainly the servants in Gore Road loved, I was going to say idolised, the Booths. The General might be harsh and abrupt at times, but they could not do enough for him, and they were never in the least afraid of him. I remember that sometimes, after a very exhausting Sunday, the Booths would take their breakfast in bed, and the maid used to laugh quite frankly at the General's appearance on these occasions. They felt for him every possible respect, but there was no fear and no servility in their attitude; they considered themselves members of the family, associated themselves with its fortunes, and entered as heartily into the religious enthusiasm of the household as into the fun and cheerfulness."

Although William Booth had an almost unreasonable, or at any rate a Hebraist's contempt for games--hating cricket and football as if they were sins--he entered with a boy's sympathy into the enthusiasm of his sons for animals. The garden at Gore Road was given up to rabbits, guineapigs, rats, mice, and fowls. The boys owned these creatures and ruled over them, but the father drew almost as much pleasure from them as did the sons. He would go round the cages and watch the feeding. If a man of one idea, and that idea a burning consciousness of the existence of a God, can be said to have a hobby, the hobby of William Booth was this boyish delight in the pets of a back-garden. His sons consulted him in every new venture, and he seems to have shared their excitement at every fresh addition to the menagerie. Bramwell Booth remembers that his father took a particular interest in his silkworms.

"I don't think any father could ever have been prouder of his children than the General," says Miss Short. "I am quite certain that it hurt him not to dress them up in beautiful clothes. But he insisted on simple, plain, strong clothes, not only for the sake of economy, but for the sake of setting an example. It used to make him furious when he saw the way in which poor people wasted precious money on stupid finery. He wouldn't even allow the family to go into mourning when Mrs. Mumford died, saying that the London poor ruined themselves by wearing black for a funeral. But he longed, I know, to see his children finely dressed, all the same. I've heard him say to them, 'When I get you all to heaven, I'll deck you; it will be safe there.' And once or twice he succumbed to temptation. I said to Mrs. Booth once, 'Wouldn't Herbert look lovely in a black velveteen suit with red stockings?'--and then I told the General that it was shameful to dress such a beautiful child in plain, ugly things, asking him whether the poor would be any worse off for seeing the little child in velveteen. Well, I got my way for once; but the child only wore the suit two or three times. I think they carried this idea too far."

Another disastrous experiment in fine raiment carried with it a religious commentary. Mrs. Booth bought some beautiful silk for the girls' dresses, and gave it to one of the women converted in the Mission for making-up, the material being too splendid for home manufacture. Unfortunately the temptation of this silk was too much for the Whitechapel woman, who disappeared with the material and was never heard of again. Mrs. Booth regarded this disaster as a lesson.

On one occasion some very fine toys were sent by rich people for a bazaar which Mrs. Booth was organizing in East London. Miss Short suggested that the children of poor people would not know what to make of such things, and counselled Mrs. Booth to buy them in for her own children. "But she wouldn't listen to me," says Miss Short, "though I could see that she would have been pleased to possess the toys for her own children. She said they were intended for the poor, and the poor must have them; and she said that she had no right to spend money on such things. I never knew people in my whole life who had such a perfect horror of debt. There were times when they were exceedingly poor, driven, one might say, for a sixpence; but never once did they incur a single debt. Mrs. Booth told me that she would far rather starve than owe a penny, and the General held the same views. They were terribly strict where money was concerned."

With such views on clothes it may be guessed that the Booths entertained very strict notions as to the wearing of jewellery. What was their horror, then, when Ballington walked into the room one day at tea-time with a ring on his finger--purchased with a shilling which had recently been given to him. Some of the astonished children, we regret to chronicle, set up a shout, "Ballington's a backslider!" and for a moment a scene of confusion reigned at the tea-table. Then the voice of the General was heard, loud, deadly, and authoritative: "Silence! His mother will deal with him later." The meal proceeded awkwardly, and when it was over Ballington was closeted for some ten minutes with his mother. "He came out from that interview," says Miss Short, "with very red eyes and without the ring."

When the last baby, Lucy, was born in 1867, the General informed the other children of this event in the following manner: "Now, listen; I have got a wonderful piece of news for you. God has sent us a most beautiful present." At once there was a shout, "Is it alive?" "Yes," said the General; "it's alive." "Is it a dog?"

"No."

"A donkey?" "No."

After a few more guesses at live-stock, the General said, with great impressiveness, "It's a baby!"

There was a shout of joy, an instant demand to see the newcomer, and then the children crept upstairs after their father, on tiptoe, and were shown the baby. Then Ballington said, "That's what I've been praying for--a baby"; but Miss Short is disposed to think that for some weeks Ballington had been praying industriously for a donkey.

"I must tell you," says Miss Short, "about the death of Mrs. Mumford. In those days the Booths had not given up the Communion service, and towards the last, poor Mrs. Mumford, who had suffered untold agonies from cancer, asked that the General should give her the Sacrament. I was present then, as I was also present at her death, and I cannot tell you how deeply I was affected by the beautiful tenderness of the General on that occasion. He made one feel that the whole service was deeply personal to the poor dying woman; he put his arm about her, bent his face close to hers, and said--I shall never forget it--'Take and eat this, Mother, in remembrance that Christ died for thee,' and, 'Drink this, Mother, in remembrance that Christ's Blood was shed for thee,' and his voice, though it trembled with tenderness, was strong with faith. I remember, too, how we were all sent for late one night, and how Bramwell and Ballington were brought to her bedside. This was the first experience either the General or his wife had had of death in their own immediate circle. They were both deeply affected. Mrs. Mumford desired to testify, and she testified in a weak and faltering voice to her unshaken faith in Christ. Afterwards, sinking back on her pillow and closing her eyes, she said, 'Sing.' The General sang a hymn and told the boys to sing with him, saying, 'Softly, softly.' While we sang that hymn very quietly, Mrs. Mumford relapsed into unconsciousness, and remained unconscious until 1 o'clock the next day. Her death was remarkable. Mrs. Booth was kneeling at her side, holding her hand, and quite suddenly Mrs. Mumford regained consciousness, opened her eyes wide, and with a light on her face that was unearthly, exclaimed, 'Kate!--Jesus!' and was gone in that moment."

The children, as one can well imagine, were greatly agitated by this death; Bramwell, in particular, was thrown into a highly nervous condition of grief. "I remember," says Miss Short, "how he would listen to no comfort from any of us, and how his father had to be fetched, and how the General bounded up the two flights of stairs to the boy's bedroom, taking him in his arms, and comforting him with a maternal tenderness while he explained the Christian hope of union."

Mrs. Booth, for some unexplained reason, insisted that her husband should be present at the post-mortem examination which followed Mrs. Mumford's death. This examination was made in the interest of medical science, for the cancer from which Mrs. Mumford had suffered so long was of an unusual and perplexing character. Why Mrs. Booth made this stipulation, unless it was to ensure reverence for her mother's remains, cannot be understood by Miss Short; for, not only was their doctor a very sincere Christian, a man in whom they all reposed an unbounded confidence, but she knew very well that William Booth shrank from any distressing sight, and found it almost impossible to support the sight of pain.

"You could not meet a man," says Miss Short, "whose nerves were more tortured by the spectacle of suffering. Pain, the sight of pain in others, made him wretched. He would turn away from it, quite sick and dizzy. I am sure it was this horror of suffering that helped to make him so terribly in earnest as a preacher, for he saw clearly that sin is a chief cause of nearly every form of pain and suffering. People will never know what he endured in the slums of great cities."

Immediately after the death of Mrs. Mumford, William Booth was taken ill, and it was discovered that he had contracted enteric fever. In his delicate state of health, such an illness was of the gravest menace, and for some time his life hung upon a thread. "Well, Sister Jane," he exclaimed to Miss Short, who came to visit him, "you see the lion chained at last." His courage, and his cheerfulness, carried him through this dangerous illness.

"He loved Mrs. Mumford like a son," says Miss Short, "and he loved his own mother--such a grand-looking old woman, stately and solemn, very Jewish in feature--with a boy's love to the last. One Sunday, when he was staying with them in London, he preached a sermon, to a crowded church, on Peace. Old Mrs. Booth was immensely proud of him, and when he returned she said to him, 'William, you preached a beautiful sermon.' He looked at her, a smile of roguishness in his eyes, and said, 'You've heard your son preach; how would you like to hear him pray, just as he used to pray, when he was a boy?' And there and then he dropped on his knees before her, buried his face in her lap, and prayed with an intensity and a force that carried us all away. In another moment he was on his feet, bright again, saying to me, 'Haven't I often told you, Sister Jane, that the Booths are a queer lot?' Once I said to him, 'You ought to have been an actor,' and he looked at me, nodded his head, and laughingly replied, 'I should have made my living!' He knew perfectly well that he could throw himself into almost anything, and, although he thought his wife was the better preacher for certain audiences, he knew that he could hold vast numbers of all sorts and conditions spellbound. I am quite sure that he would have been a great actor; but oh, wouldn't he have been unhappy without religion!"

Miss Short cannot remember a single occasion on which theological difficulties, difficulties of faith, were discussed at the Booth table. Although religion entered into every detail of their lives, they never spoke--at any rate before Miss Short--of intellectual problems, all their difficulties lying in the sphere of conduct. To live more perfectly in accord with the Christ spirit, to make other Christians more earnest, to save sinners from temporal wretchedness and everlasting damnation--these were the chief subjects of their table-talk. "I think it was the suffering and misery all about them," says Miss Short, "which made the General and his wife stick to the simple elementary truths of religion. I know this, that they had made up their minds to treat the London poor exactly like heathen. It would have been absurd to preach to these poor people about theology; and the General, whose heart was torn by suffering, centred himself on saving their souls. I have heard him preach very beautiful sermons on love, and I remember in particular a sermon on the text, Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace, which was as gentle as it was moving; but he used to say, whenever we praised sermons of this kind, 'No; the best preaching is Damnation, with the Cross in the middle of it.' Experience had taught him that. The heathen poor had to be roused to a sense of their danger before they could shake off their spiritual torpor, and even desire immortal happiness. I don't think his thoughts ever wandered very far from that centre of religion. He believed that the Bible was the inspired Word of God; and in the Bible he found that the injunction to repent preceded the invitation to holiness. No one in his house questioned for a single moment, or in any respect, the truth of the Bible."

As an example of the harrowing effect produced upon William Booth's mind by the destitution and depravity of London, Miss Short relates the story of the first Christmas Day she spent in his home. "The General," she says, "had determined that the children should have a thoroughly happy old-fashioned Christmas, and for a week beforehand every preparation was made for a great family festival. The children were full of excitement, their father entered into the spirit of the thing, and I really thought it would be a day of the purest happiness. But when the General returned from his preaching in Whitechapel on Christmas morning, he was pale, haggard, and morose. He did his best to enter into the children's fun and frolic, but it was no use; he kept relapsing into silence and gloom. He looked dreadfully white and drawn, just as if he were ill or harassed by some grievous worry. And then suddenly he burst out, 'I'll never have a Christmas Day like this again!' and, getting on his feet and walking up and down the room like a caged lion, he told us of the sights he had seen that morning in Whitechapel, indignantly saying, 'The poor have nothing but the public-house--nothing but the public-house!' I remembered how he had once stopped me at every public-house in the Mile End Road, pointing to the young men and the young women who crowded the different bars, exclaiming, 'Look at that!--look at it!--enough to make the angels weep!' Sights of this kind, which other people would see and regret, seemed to stab him to the heart; other people only saw the drinking, he saw the poverty, the misery, the disease, and the godlessness behind it; the sins of London didn't shock him, they seemed to tear at his heart with claws that drew blood. Well, he was true to his word. That Christmas Day was the last Christmas Day the Booth family ever spent together. On the following Christmas Day we were scattered in the slums distributing plum-puddings. I remember that we thought the Mission a very great affair because we gave away 150 puddings! How little any of us foresaw the future. Last year the Army distributed 30,000 puddings in London alone! All the same, our little gift of 150, many of them made in the kitchen at Gore Road, was the beginning of the Salvation Army's Christmas Day. The General said to me one day, after a prayer meeting, at which some of the recipients had been blessed, 'Sister Jane, the Lord accepted our puddings.'"

Distressed as he was by the penury and degradation of East London, William Booth was never morose when working to change the souls of men. Miss Short says he would carry a meeting before him by his humour and his hopefulness; and the more miserable and broken-hearted his audience, the more cheerfulness he put into his methods. She remembers that he was preaching once in a hall for the first time under a sounding-board--very heavy and clumsy contrivance which hung just over his head. At the end of his address he invited men to come and testify on the platform, adding, "But only those who are really saved had better come, for"--pointing to the sounding-board, "it may mean death." It was such remarks as this, startling In those days, which endeared him to his rough audiences, who were sharply suspicious of sanctimoniousness.

He was, nevertheless, still a trifle clerical, for on one occasion when a converted navvy desired to preach, he insisted that the man should wear a black suit of clothes, and actually gave the convert his only other suit, frock coat and all, in which the new preacher cut a sufficiently comical figure. It will be explained later on that only after many rebuffs from the Churches did he strike out on those original lines which culminated in the Salvation Army.

His great secret of success, Miss Short is quite certain, was the discovery of the enormous influence of love and kindness in dealing with fallen humanity. Very early in those first years in London, he showed boundless compassion to a man sunk in misery and sin, hunting his soul with the "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound of Heaven. And when the man yielded at last, it was with the astonished exclamation, "Love and kindness! Then there really is a God."

"There were many disappointments," says Miss Short, "some of them enough to embitter any man; but he never lost heart, although these disappointments caused him dreadful pain at the time. One of his evangelists went wrong, and for days he found it impossible to shake off the sorrow caused by this fall. Then there was a young man who worked for him, and whom he loved, a young man with what you might call a story-book face--so handsome, heroic, and pure. One day they came and told the General that this young man was in the London Hospital with a serious injury to his spine; although he shrank from seeing this friend in pain, he posted off at once, and when he arrived it was to hear a confession of embezzlement. He knelt down at the bedside, before the whole ward, and prayed for the soul of that young man, his own heart utterly miserable. But in this case he was made happy by the restoration of the injured youth, who took his advice, made a full confession of his crime, and repaid every penny of the money. That, as you probably know, was one of the General's strictest rules. Repentance meant confession and restoration. This teaching sent many a man to prison whose crime would never have been discovered, and many more he sent to the employers, often going with them, to confess the sins of which they had been guilty."

Of his stern honesty with himself Miss Short does not entertain the shadow of a doubt. "You can see how honest he was by his relations with Mr. Henry Reed, the very rich Australian living in Tunbridge Wells who came under the spell of Mr. Booth's preaching. I can distinctly remember the joy and the hope with which the General set out on one of his journeys to Dunorlan, Mr. Reed's beautiful place in Tunbridge Wells, believing that he would come back with hundreds of pounds towards the three thousand he was striving to raise for a Mission Hall. But he came back, instead, utterly depressed; indeed, I think that was the only occasion on which I ever saw him really dejected. And why was this? It was just because the religious people surrounding Mr. Reed, and who crowded the park to hear the Whitechapel missionary preach, were such 'poor stuff.' I remember how the General walked up and down the room muttering, 'I want men!--I want men!' He doubted all religion that made people soft and selfish. He was very suspicious of any religion which did not fructify into work for others. The people he met that day thought too much of dogma and too little of Christian service--they didn't hunger and thirst after the saving of lost souls. Mr. Reed offered the General a lot of money, and if I remember rightly a suitable site in East London, and a fine hall that was to cost something like seven thousand pounds. But after making this splendid offer, which took the General's breath away, Mr. Reed explained that the Mission in future must be conducted in a manner of which he approved, making it quite clear that he expected to exercise authority over the General. A weaker man than the General might have been tempted to accept this splendid gift on any terms, but the General was far too honest a man to prevaricate for a moment. He rejected the offer. He refused to put himself under the dominion of a sect. But I really think he was more dejected by the spirit of the Christianity he encountered in Tunbridge Wells than by the loss of this tremendously large sum of money. He kept on saying, 'I want men!--I want men!'"

[Another of the conditions of Mr. Reed, not mentioned by Miss Jane Short, was that William Booth should settle permanently in East London and not roam about, and in that event he would settle a generous sum upon him and Mrs. Booth. He was a liberal and earnest man, but he liked apparently to exercise authority.]

We shall see in the next chapter the character of the difficulties which confronted William Booth in East London, and which made him even think of abandoning the Mission. For the present we will conclude this account of the Booths' domestic life with some remarks on the subject of the father's relations with his children.

It would be possible, perhaps, for an unscrupulous writer in years to come, when witnesses for the defence are dead, to accuse William Booth of something like harshness towards his children; to suggest, at any rate, that he was a man who preached one life in the pulpit and did not quite practise it in his home. We do not pretend for a moment that he was faultless: we readily deplore in him the absence of some of those refinements of nature which are the marks of genuine sainthood; he was not perhaps as gentle as we could wish a hero of religion to be; he lacked something of that fathomless humility, that unbounded reverence for childhood, and that inexhaustible tolerance for the weaknesses of human nature which endear the holiest of men to the affections of mortality.

But enough has been said in this place to prevent his exhibition, even with these faults, as anything but a true and affectionate father. He was not one thing in the pulpit and another in his home; he was never in such a relation to his children as made them distrust or fear him. Those occasional explosions which characterized him all through life, and which malignity might exaggerate, were never taken very seriously either by his children or by his followers. They sprang from physical disabilities, from dyspepsia, and from the attacks of neuralgia which repeatedly racked his nerves; and they were short-lived. He was a man who never sulked. Suddenly he would blaze into anger, with all the appearance of fiery indignation, and at the next moment he would be laughing at himself, or rallying with generous humour the victim of his reproof.

Bramwell Booth, whose reverence for his father is well known, and on whom that father leaned almost alone in the years of his widowerhood, is honest and fearless enough to say that he considers his father did thrash him on several occasions without justice. At the same time he scoffs out of hearing the least suggestion that his father was despotic or unkind. "We adored him!" he exclaims; "every one of us; and, even when we sulked, we were always longing for his forgiveness."

Miss Short's testimony is to the like effect. "When the elder children were in trouble it was usually to their father, not to their mother, that they would go. I remember one day that Emma had a bad fit, after squashing a finger very badly in one of the doors; she lay sobbing on the floor, refusing to be comforted, till her father rushed upstairs, threw himself on the floor beside her, gathered her into his arms, and mothered her with all the tenderness of a woman. He was impatient with them at times, particularly when he was bowed down by worries, but he loved them most dearly. One day he was dictating a number of letters to me in his room, when one of the girls entered, went to the piano, and sat down to practise her scales. Mrs. Booth was lying down in the next room, ill and nervous. He jumped up, seized the child in his hands, rated her soundly for not thinking of her mother, and then pushed her sharply out of the room. On that occasion he was distinctly angry, and it pained me to see the child treated so roughly. But a minute or two afterwards Mrs. Booth entered the room. 'William,' she said reproachfully, 'it was kind of you to think of me, but I am sorry you should ------' In an instant he was on his feet, with his arms round her, and I slipped from the room. He could repent with all the abandonment of a child."

No one, says Miss Short, can possibly understand William Booth who does not realize that he was of a most energetic and enthusiastic nature. "I have never met any one," she declares, "who could compare with him in any way in this respect. And as he was an extraordinarily pure man, loathing and abominating anything that was the least coarse--his purity of mind, heart, and soul struck me greatly--you can see that the force of his nature would drive him furiously through the day's work. He was always facing in the one direction. The day could never be too long for what he had to do. And nobody, I'm afraid, could ever be quick enough and intelligent enough to keep up with him. I know that he broke me down! Mrs. Booth herself warned me on several occasions that if I let him he would kill me; and indeed I had to go away at last, and take a long sea voyage, to recover even a fraction of my former health."

One of the early memories shared by Miss Short and Mr. Bramwell Booth concerns William Booth's love of singing. They both told me that he seldom ran upstairs, and apparently he never walked upstairs when he could help it, without singing, and that while he was dressing in the morning they would often hear him singing at the top of his voice. Mrs. Booth understood nothing of music, but William Booth was never so happy as when he was singing, and it was one of his greatest joys in life that all his children were musical, some of them being among the first composers of Salvation Army music.

 

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