The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation ArmyRailton, George S. (George Scott)
History
The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army
Railton, George S. (George Scott)
Booth, William, 1829-1912; Salvation Army
By most men, in their prime, it would be thought an ample filling up of
any week to address three large Meetings on the Sunday, and one each
week night; but The General, at seventy-four, saw that, travelling by
motor, and visiting in the daytime such smaller towns and villages as
had never seen him before, or not for many years, he could not only
reckon upon three large indoor Meetings every day, but speak, perhaps,
to millions of people he had never before addressed. And so in six Motor
Tours he passed from end to end and from side to side of Great Britain,
gathering crowds from day to day for six weeks at a time.
We have met with people frivolous enough to write of all that as if The
General's Motor Tours were luxuries! In one glorious sense they were
really so, for, to him, there could never be a greater luxury than to
proclaim the Gospel to a crowd. But, as a matter of fact, he found it
less expensive to travel in this way than to go as he ordinarily did for
a long journey to and from London by train to reach each town
separately.
And the economy of Army forces, by means of Motor Tours, has been
marvellous, every little Corps and village Outpost on the route on
week-days being given an opportunity to gather crowds they never
ordinarily reached together, and to unite their own efforts for once
with those of their General in trying to lift up Christ more than ever
before.
And The General was so alive to the value of inflaming the love of any
handful of villagers or children, but especially of his Soldiers and
Officers to the Master, that it was to him a continual delight to move
about amongst his Soldiery in every land.
The General could rarely venture to plan very far ahead, because his
public appearances had all to be made to fit in with other and often
even more important engagements, of which only his Staff knew anything.
It is, indeed, marvellous how few engagements he made ever had to be
broken, and how successful almost every Campaign of his has been, seeing
at how short notice most of them were undertaken. In one of his diaries
I found a bitter complaint of the waste of time involved in having to
wait for three hours between the steamboat and train. "Why," he asks,
"could they not have arranged a Meeting for me?"
One who has travelled 8,000 miles with him on four Motor Tours says,
though everybody, everywhere, pressmen included, were of necessity
impressed with his sincerity and transparency, they could see that he
had all the time only one object in view, the glory of God and the
Salvation of souls.
And it is the extent to which he led all ranks into the same spirit
which made it easy for arrangements to be made and carried out in so few
hours for the very largest demonstrations, as to which it was never
possible to hold any approach to a rehearsal, those joining in them
living usually so widely apart from each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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