Chapter II: Salvation In Youth

In convincing him that goodness was the only safe passport to peace and prosperity of any lasting kind, William Booth's mother had happily laid in the heart of her boy the best foundation for a happy life, "Be good, William, and then all will be well," she had said to him over and over again.

But how was he to "be good"? The English National Church, eighty years ago, had reached a depth of cold formality and uselessness which can hardly be imagined now. Nowhere was this more manifest than in the "parish" church. The rich had their allotted pew, a sort of reserved seat, into which no stranger dare enter, deserted though it might be by its holders for months together. For the poor, seats were in some churches placed in the broad aisles or at the back of the pulpit, so conspicuously marking out the inferiority of all who sat in them as almost to serve as a notice to every one that the ideas of Jesus Christ had no place there. Even when an earnest clergyman came to any church, he had really a battle against great prejudices on both sides if he wished to make any of "the common people" feel welcome at "common prayer." But the way the appointed services were "gone through" was only too often such as to make every one look upon the whole matter as one which only concerned the clergy. Especially was this the effect on young people. Anything like interest, or pleasure, in those dull and dreary, not to say "vain" repetitions on their part must indeed have been rare.

It is not surprising then that William Booth saw nothing to attract him in the Church of his fathers. John Wesley, that giant reformer of religion in England, had been dead some forty years, and his life-work had not been allowed to affect "the Church" very profoundly. His followers having seceded from it contrary to his orders and entreaties, had already made several sects, and in the chief of these William Booth presently found for himself at least a temporary home. Here the services were, to some extent, independent of books; earnest preaching of the truth was often heard from the pulpits, and some degree of real concern for the spiritual advancement of the people was manifested by the preachers.

Under this preaching and these influences, and the singing of Wesley's hymns, the lad was deeply moved. To his last days he sang some of those grand old songs as much as, if not more than, any others; that one, for example, containing the verse:--

And can I yet delay my little all to give?
To tear my soul from earth away, for Jesus to receive?
Nay, but I yield, I yield! I can hold out no more,
I sink, by dying love compelled, and own Thee conqueror.

The mind that has never yet come in contact with teaching of this character can scarcely comprehend the effect of such thoughts on a young and ardent soul. This Jesus, who gave up Heaven and all that was bright and pleasant to devote Himself to the world's Salvation, was presented to him as coming to ask the surrender of his heart and life to His service, and his heart could not long resist the appeal. It was in no large congregation, however, but in one of the smaller Meetings that William Booth made the glorious sacrifice of himself which he had been made to understand was indispensable to real religion. Speaking some time ago, he thus described that great change:--

"When as a giddy youth of fifteen I was led to attend Wesley
Chapel, Nottingham, I cannot recollect that any individual pressed
me in the direction of personal surrender to God. I was wrought
upon quite independently of human effort by the Holy Ghost, who
created within me a great thirst for a new life.

"I felt that I wanted, in place of the life of self-indulgence, to
which I was yielding myself, a happy, conscious sense that I was
pleasing God, living right, and spending all my powers to get
others into such a life. I saw that all this ought to be, and I
decided that it should be. It is wonderful that I should have
reached this decision in view of all the influences then around me.
My professedly Christian master never uttered a word to indicate
that he believed in anything he could not see, and many of my
companions were worldly and sensual, some of them even vicious.

"Yet I had that instinctive belief in God which, in common with my
fellow-creatures, I had brought into the world with me. I had no
disposition to deny my instincts, which told me that if there was a
God His laws ought to have my obedience and His interests my
service.

"I felt that it was better to live right than to live wrong, and as
to caring for the interests of others instead of my own, the
condition of the suffering people around me, people with whom I had
been so long familiar, and whose agony seemed to reach its climax
about this time, undoubtedly affected me very deeply.

"There were children crying for bread to parents whose own distress
was little less terrible to witness.

"One feeling specially forced itself upon me, and I can recollect
it as distinctly as though it had transpired only yesterday, and
that was the sense of the folly of spending my life in doing things
for which I knew I must either repent or be punished in the days to
come.

"In my anxiety to get into the right way, I joined the Methodist
Church, and attended the Class Meetings, to sing and pray and speak
with the rest." (A Class Meeting was the weekly muster of all
members of the church, who were expected to tell their leader
something of their soul's condition in answer to his inquiries.)
"But all the time the inward Light revealed to me that I must not
only renounce everything I knew to be sinful, but make restitution,
so far as I had the ability, for any wrong I had done to others
before I could find peace with God.

"The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an
evil act of the past which required restitution. In a boyish
trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions,
whilst giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of
a generous fellowship. As a testimonial of their gratitude they
had given me a silver pencil-case. Merely to return their gift
would have been comparatively easy, but to confess the deception I
had practised upon them was a humiliation to which for some days I
could not bring myself.

"I remember, as if it were but yesterday, the spot in the corner of
a room under the chapel, the hour, the resolution to end the
matter, the rising up and rushing forth, the finding of the young
fellow I had chiefly wronged, the acknowledgment of my sin, the
return of the pencil-case--the instant rolling away from my heart
of the guilty burden, the peace that came in its place, and the
going forth to serve my God and my generation from that hour.

"It was in the open street that this great change passed over me,
and if I could only have possessed the flagstone on which I stood
at that happy moment, the sight of it occasionally might have been
as useful to me as the stones carried up long ago from the bed of
the Jordan were to the Israelites who had passed over them
dry-shod.

"Since that night, for it was near upon eleven o'clock when the
happy change was realised, the business of my life has been not
only to make a holy character but to live a life of loving activity
in the service of God and man. I have ever felt that true religion
consists not only in being holy myself, but in assisting my
Crucified Lord in His work of saving men and women, making them
into His Soldiers, keeping them faithful to death, and so getting
them into Heaven.

"I have had to encounter all sorts of difficulties as I have
travelled along this road. The world has been against me, sometimes
very intensely, and often very stupidly. I have had difficulties
similar to those of other men, with my own bodily appetites, with
my mental disposition, and with my natural unbelief.

"Many people, both religious and irreligious, are apt to think that
they are more unfavourably constituted than their comrades and
neighbours, and that their circumstances and surroundings are
peculiarly unfriendly to the discharge of the duties they owe to
God and man.

"I have been no exception in this matter. Many a time I have been
tempted to say to myself, 'There is no one fixed so awkwardly for
holy living and faithful fighting as I am.' But I have been
encouraged to resist the delusion by remembering the words of the
Apostle Paul: 'There hath no temptation taken you but such as is
common to man.'

"I am not pretending to say that I have worked harder, or practised
more self-denial, or endured more hardships at any particular time
of my life than have those around me; but I do want those who feel
any interest in me to understand that faithfulness to God in the
discharge of duty and the maintenance of a good conscience have
cost me as severe a struggle as they can cost any Salvation Soldier
in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, or Tokio to-day.

"One reason for the victory I daily gained from the moment of my
conversion was, no doubt, my complete and immediate separation from
the godless world. I turned my back on it. I gave it up, having
made up my mind beforehand that if I did go in for God I would do
so with all my might. Rather than yearning for the world's
pleasures, books, gains, or recreations, I found my new nature
leading me to come away from it all. It had lost all charm for me.
What were all the novels, even those of Sir Walter Scott or
Fenimore Cooper, compared with the story of my Saviour? What were
the choicest orators compared with Paul? What was the hope of
money-earning, even with all my desire to help my poor mother and
sisters, in comparison with the imperishable wealth of ingathered
souls? I soon began to despise everything the world had to offer
me.

"In those days I felt, as I believe many Converts do, that I could
willingly and joyfully travel to the ends of the earth for Jesus
Christ, and suffer anything imaginable to help the souls of other
men. Jesus Christ had baptised me, according to His eternal
promise, with His Spirit and with Fire.

"Yet the surroundings of my early life were all in opposition to
this whole-hearted devotion. No one at first took me by the hand
and urged me forward, or gave me any instruction or hint likely to
help me in the difficulties I had at once to encounter in my
consecration to this service."

This clear experience and teaching of an absolutely new life, that "eternal life" which Jesus Christ promises to all His true followers, is indispensable to the right understanding of everything in connexion with the career we are recording. Without such an experience nothing of what follows could have been possible. With it the continual resistance to every contrary teaching and influence, and the strenuous struggle by all possible means to propagate it are inevitable.

One is amazed at this time of day, to find intelligent men writing as though there were some mysticism, or something quite beyond ordinary understanding, in this theory of conversion, or regeneration.

Precisely the process which The General thus describes in his own case must of necessity follow any thoughtful and prayerful consideration of the mission and Gospel of Christ. Either we must reject the whole Bible story or we must admit that "all we like sheep have gone astray," taking our own course, in contempt of God's wishes. To be convinced of that must plunge any soul into just such a depth of sorrow and anxiety as left this lad no rest until he had found peace in submission to his God. No outside influences or appearances can either produce or be substituted for the deep, inward resolve of the wandering soul, "I will arise, and go to my Father." Whether that decision be come to in some crowded Meeting, or in the loneliness of some midnight hour is quite unimportant. But how can there be true repentance, or the beginning of reconciliation with God, until that point is reached?

And whenever that returning to God takes place, there is the same abundant pardon, the same change of heart, the same new birth, which has here been described. What can be more simple and matter of fact? Take away the need and possibility of such "conversion," and this whole life becomes a delusion, and the proclamation of Jesus Christ as a Saviour of men inexcusable. What has created any mystery around the question amongst Christians, if not the sacramental theory, which more or less contradicts it all? In almost all Christian Churches a theory is set up that a baby by some ceremonial act becomes suddenly regenerated, "made a child of God, and an heir of His Kingdom."

If that were the case, there could, of course, have been no need for the later regeneration of that child; but I do not believe that an ecclesiastic could be found, from the Vatican to the most remote island-parish where children are "christened," who would profess to have seen such a regenerated child alive. There is notoriously no such change accomplished in any one, until the individual himself, convinced of his own godless condition, cries to God for His Salvation, and receives that great gift.

What a foundation for life was the certainty which that lad got as he knelt in that little room in Nottingham! Into that same "full assurance" he was later on to lead many millions--young and old--of many lands. The simple Army verse:--

I know thy sins are all forgiven,
Glory to the Bleeding Lamb!
And I am on my way to Heaven,
Glory to the Bleeding Lamb!

embalms for ever that grand starting-point of the soul, from which our people have been able, in ignorance of almost everything else of Divine truth, to commence a career of holy living, and of loving effort for the souls of others.

How much more weight those few words carry than the most eloquent address bereft of that certainty of tone could ever have!

That certainty which rests not upon any study of books, even of the Bible itself, but upon the soul's own believing vision of the Lamb of God who has taken its sins away; that certainty which changes in a moment the prison darkness of the sin-chained into the light and joy and power of the liberated slave of Christ; that is the great conquest of the Salvation Soldier everywhere.

And yet, perhaps, in the eyes of an unbelieving world, and a doubting Church, that was General Booth's great offence all through life. To think of having uneducated and formerly godless people "bawling" the "mysteries of the faith" through the streets of "Christian" cities, where it had hitherto been thought inconsistent with Christian humility for any one to dare to say they really knew Him "whom to know is life eternal"! Oh, that was the root objection to all The General's preaching and action.

And it was one of the most valuable features of his whole career that wherever he or his messengers went there came that same certainty which from the days of Bethlehem onwards Jesus Christ came to bring to every man.

"By faith we know!" If every outward manifestation of The General's successes could be swept off the world to-morrow, this positive faith in the one Saviour would be capable of reproducing all its blessed results over again, wherever it was preserved, or renewed. Any so-called faith which gives no certainty must needs be hustled out of the way of an investigating, hurrying, wealth-seeking age. Only those who are certain that they have found the Lord can be capable of inducing others to seek and find Him.