Revival movements have always boasted of moral successes, but history shows that they make no real impression on the community. The method is unscientific and doomed to failure. A salvation meeting, with its noise and excitement, has as much effect on public morality as a savage’s tom-tom has upon the heavens. The noisy things in nature are generally futile. Whirlwinds and earthquakes affect the imagination, but it is the regular action of air and water that produces the greatest changes, and the gentle action of rain and sunshine that ripens the harvest. These “spiritual,” and nearly always hysterical, agencies for human improvement, are based upon a denial of the physical basis of life, and of the doctrine of moral causation. They attract great attention, and their leaders gain tremendous applause. But all the while the real work of progress is being done by other agencies—by the spread of knowledge, the growth of education, the discoveries of science, the silent triumphs of art, and the gradual expansion of the human mind. Agitation is not necessarily progress. What is wanted is a new ingredient, and that is furnished by the more obscure, and often lonely men, whose greatness is only known to a few, although their thoughts are the seed of future harvests of wisdom and happiness for the human race. Suppose, however, we concede, for the sake of argument, all the claims of the Salvation Army as a religious agency of reform. This would afford a presumption of its continued success _on the old lines_. But the _new lines_ are a fresh departure. General Booth himself admits that “the new sphere on which we are entering will call for faculties other than those which have hitherto been cultivated.” What guarantee has he then, beyond an unbounded and possibly exaggerated belief in himself, that those “faculties” will come when he “calls for” them? Will men of the required stamp of character and ability enrol themselves under the despotism of General Booth? And if they did, how long would he be able to hold them together? First of all, at any rate he has to get them. The ordinary Salvation Army captain is not equal to these things. This is obvious to General Booth; hence his fervid appeal to persons of greater capacity to throw themselves into his enterprise. But we do not believe he will obtain their assistance. It is far easier to extract a hundred thousand pounds, or even a million, from a gullible public, than to induce men and women of the stamp required in the successful conduct of a big social experiment to place themselves at the absolute command of a religious revivalist.