The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation ArmyRailton, George S. (George Scott)
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The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army
Railton, George S. (George Scott)
Booth, William, 1829-1912; Salvation Army
"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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