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
"We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through
opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look
back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of
self-congratulation. It is not often true. A well-known millionaire told
me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little
boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother's cottage carrying to
her in a tight-clenched fist his first week's wage--a sixpenny bit. Mr.
Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to
dream of his romantic life. 'I haven't time,' he said; 'the present is
too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.' Mr. Chamberlain in
the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing. Perhaps we
may say that men of action never look back. And so it was with General
Booth. He might well have rested during these last few years in a large
and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement,
and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent
in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over
the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction.
Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to
rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child
happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are
full of happiness and delight. But this old, rough-tongued,
weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but
thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of
the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands
of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born
from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once
dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay,
who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races,
numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government,
living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The
Salvation Army--he who could see all this, and who could justly say,
'But for me these things had never been,' was not happy and was not
satisfied. He ached and groaned to save all such as are sorrowful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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