sympathies and to approve of revivalist methods. Their love-letters must be of interest to any student of the nineteenth century who looks below the political and economic surface.
The lovers were married in 1855. Booth had then established something of a reputation as a travelling preacher of methodism, but his violent methods in the pulpit had made him powerful enemies. At the end of nine years in the ministry, rather than submit to the authority of his church, he broke with methodism, and launched out as an independent revivalist (1861). Mrs. Booth joined in this work, and it was at her suggestion that Booth came to London in 1865 and started the Christian Mission in Whitechapel. Thirteen years later, when he was nearly fifty years of age, William Booth accidentally converted his ‘Christian Mission’ into the ‘Salvation Army’ merely by the use of a metaphor (1878). One day in describing the Christian Mission in the presence of his son Bramwell, he used the phrase ‘a volunteer army’. The son objected, since the new volunteer movement was just then the subject of some ridicule, declaring that he was a ‘regular’ or he was nothing. Booth altered the offending phrase to ‘a salvation army’, and from that alteration came the military titles (against which he fought for some time) and the military uniform (which he himself only gradually and grudgingly adopted), destined to transform the Whitechapel mission into a worldwide engine of revivalism.
Almost at once public attention was drawn to a new force in the religious life of the nation. Booth became the champion of ‘the bottom dog’. He was sick of respectable people. His sympathies were genuinely on the side of the depressed, and as genuinely he believed that eternal punishment was the fate of all those who perished without the experience of conversion. But this grim theology was mitigated by a love for the degraded poor of great cities which was something new in modern England’s religious life. Booth ‘saved’ these people in battalions, and proved to all the churches that the religious instincts of the urbanized people were much the same as in Wesley’s day at the dawn of the industrial revolution. He beat his showman’s drum in what he believed to be the service of the Light of the World, and speedily became the target of ridicule and calumny, the stormy centre of much rioting. But he pushed steadily forward, helped by his wife. and children, and drew multitudes
to ‘the penitent’s form’. Deeper acquaintance with the problem he was so impulsively attacking led him to become a social reformer. In 1890 he published a book called In Darkest England and the Way Out. It was largely written by the journalist W. T. Stead [q.v.], and altogether lacking in Booth’s impressive Doric; but it created a sensation, and in spite of a very bitter and rather ridiculous attack by T. H. Huxley, Booth was liberally financed by the British public to look after the souls and bodies of ‘the dim millions’.
He always held that you cannot make a man clean by washing his shirt, and his social work was chiefly an excuse for getting at the souls of men; but he had real and deep pity for the distressed poor, and he admitted the influence of environment. He was indirectly responsible for a much more intelligent attention on the part both of the churches and the politicians to the physical conditions of human life. It is characteristic of him that he hung back from a crusade for sexual purity which his son Bramwell persuaded W. T. Stead to undertake in the Pall Mall Gazette, and that he desired the rescue work of the ‘Army’ to be solely in the hands of women. In spite of all his platform outspokenness, he was a timorous administrator of the ‘Army’, and used his autocracy chiefly to safeguard its spiritual activities. His son Bramwell was the real organizer. Booth used to call him his Melanchthon.
His days were clouded by family secessions, and almost brought to wreck by the sufferings of his wife as she lay dying from cancer. In the end he was overtaken by blindness, but continued to visit many and far countries of the world where the Salvation Army flag was flying, evoking extraordinary enthusiasm from the multitudes, receiving the hospitality of kings and ambassadors. In those days, with his strong Jewish features, his flowing white beard, his wild looks, and his tall attenuated frame, the venerable man was something of a patriarchal figure in British public life. He died in London 20 August 1912. His wife, by whom he had three sons and four daughters, had died in 1890.
Booth is much more interesting as a man than as a founder of anything new in religion or politics. He was entirely ignorant of theology, unacquainted with any language except his own, and entertained an almost savage prejudice against science and philosophy. In everything intellectual he was an obscurantist of the
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