The War Romance of the Salvation ArmyHill, Grace Livingston
History
The War Romance of the Salvation Army
Hill, Grace Livingston
World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Salvation Army
In the direful disaster that swept over the beautiful city of Halifax,
the Mayor of that city stated: “I do not know what I should have done
the first two or three days following the explosion, when everyone was
panic- stricken without the ready, intelligent, and unbroken
day-and-night efforts of the Salvation Army.”
On numerous other similar occasions we have relieved distress and
sorrow by our almost instantaneous service. Hence when our honored
President decided that our National Emblem, heralder of the inalienable
rights of man, should cross the seas and wave for the freedom of the
peoples of the earth, automatically the Salvation Army moved with it,
and our officers passed to the varying posts of helpfulness which the
emergency demanded.
Now on all sides I am confronted with the question: _What is the secret
of the Salvation Army’s success in the war?_
Permit me to suggests three reasons which, in my judgment, account for
it:
First, when the war-bolt fell, when the clarion call sounded, it found
_the Salvation Army ready!_
Ready not only with our material machinery, but with that precious
piece of human mechanism which is indispensable to all great and high
achievement—the right calibre of man, and the right calibre of woman.
Men and women equipped by a careful training for the work they would
have to do.
We were not many in number, I admit. In France our numbers have been
regrettably few. But this is because I have felt it was better to fall
short in quantity than to run the risk in falling short in quality.
Quality is its own multiplication table. Quality without quantity will
spread, whereas quantity without quality will shrink. Therefore, I
would not send any officers to France except such as had been fully
equipped in our training schools.
Few have even a remote idea of the extensive training given to all
Salvation Army officers by our military system of education, covering
all the tactics of that particular warfare to which they have
consecrated their lives—_the service of humanity_.
We have in the Salvation Army thirty-nine Training Schools in which our
own men and women, both for our missionary and home fields, receive an
intelligent tuition and practical training in the minutest details of
their service. They are trained in the finest and most intricate of all
the arts, the art of dealing ably with human life.
It is a wonderful art which transfigures a sheet of cold grey canvas
into a throbbing vitality, and on its inanimate spread visualizes a
living picture from which one feels they can never turn their eyes
away.
It is a wonderful art which takes a rugged, knotted block of marble,
standing upon a coarse wooden bench, and cuts out of its uncomely
crudeness—as I saw it done—the face of my father, with its every
feature illumined with prophetic light, so true to life that I felt
that to my touch it surely must respond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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