WILLIAM BOOTH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20229, 13 April 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

WILLIAM BOOTH.

AN UNCONVENTIONAL CAREER

BY II AX AN GA.

The centenary of William Booth, ' founder of tha Salvation Army, is worth mora than passing notice, so remarkable was his personality and so far-reaching and enduring the work ha did. His uraer remains attractive. He tasted adI versitv early, for his father, a builder, i speculated ruinously in house propertv i and became sorely troubled to find his family even meagre maintenance. The father dying, tha family removed from Nottingham to London, and there, at the age ot 20, William Booth got employment as clerk to a pawnbroker. There was a quarrel when his employer wanted him to work on Sunday, and ho was turned adrift, friendless and with only sixpence in his pocket. That- sixpence he gave to a poor, consumptive woman carrying a bundle on Clapham Common. It was a vexing plight for a young fellow on the threshold of manhood, but in his stand for principle and his bestowal of that sixpence can be read part of the secret cf his life's success. In William Booth's boyhood there had come to Nottingham a Chartist orator, O'Connor, and of him the boy became an ardent admirer, inspired with a solicitude for the poor and an eagerness to help them. By this time, too, he had learned to pri2e religion. Baptised in the Church of England, to which his parents belonged. ha had found among Methodists a way to heartfelt religious experience, and the visit to Nottingham of James Co.ughey, an American " revivalist," afterwards awakened in him a deep attachment to evangelistic work. At fifteen he began to preachy finding in the open air a congenial occupation of his sparo time and energy. By tha time he went to London he was confirmed in habits of which his quarrel with the pawnbroker and his parting with his last sixpence were j significant, as they now seem eloquently I expressive oi all he tried to do in after ' life. An Ideal Marriage. It. was natural that he became, soon after that crisis, an agent of the Methodist New Connexion, natural too that, when he married while so employed, his choice should fall op. one devout and capable. Catherine Booth's name will ever be memorially honoured with his own. W. T. Stead wrote of that union as " one of the four ideal marriages of the century." He explained the reference thus— The Queen and Prince Albert, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Browning. Canon and Mrs. Josephine Butler, General and Mrs. Booth form a quartet which come as near the realisation of the ideal marriage as the world has ret seen. In all four the _ wife was intellectually at least the equal of the man. The career of Mr. and Mrs. Booth as evangelists in the Methodist New Connexion came to an. end in 1865, owing to the determination of the Conference to compel them to undertake ordinary circuit work. On their declining to obey this instruction the use of the churches of the denomination was forbidden to tnern, and "n July 2, 1565, in a large tent, erected in a Quaker burial-ground at Mile-end Waste, Whitechapel, in the East i End of London, William Booth conducted that service which is regarded as the virtual origin of the Salvation. Army, j although the military title was not adopted until twelve years later. The Coming oi the Army. His own words about this change best tell the story: At twenty-five years of age I became a Methodist minister. I had previously been an evangelist, as they call them, for two and a-half years, and for four year 3 I was put down to regular circuit work. But I couldn't rest; I wanted to get out into the wide sea of misery surging and sweltering around me. The Conference wouldn't let me do that special work, the only work for which I felt myself really fitted; and so, believing I was called to it by God. I *.%ent out and left erery friend I had in the world. There, followed the creation of (be Christian Mission, with branches throughout England, its founder travelling and extending the new enterprise. From this grew the Salvation Army. Its military form of organisation was not at once adopted. " Groping our way out of the conventionalism in which we had been trained," he wrote in later life, " we tried committees, conferences and all sorts of governments, showing how far we were wrong, until the military idea was revealed to us." I nri often asked about our title and its origin. It happened in this way. 1 was upstairs oue day with my two secretaries. William Bramwell Booth and George Scott Railton. drafting the annua! report of our work, and dictating rapidly to them. " The Christian Mission is a Volunteer Army," wrote my son. Something Mashed across rr.e. I leaned over his shoulder, scratched out the world " Volunteer," and wrote the I word " Salvation." " The Christian Mission i 3 a Salvation Army," ran the corrected j sentence, which pealed forth the clarion I cji.ll of religious mid moral reformation to J the working men and women of the world. Getting Things .Done. I But he always insisted that he had I never taken anything as a model—no church, no chapel, no army." As a | matter of fact, the title " captain " was | intended to be rather nautical than miiiI tarv, in order to catch the eye of the ! Whitby fishermen. There v,as needed a I ! namo for assistant evangelist. " Lieutenant" served the purpose. Elders and I class-leaders were no more; "sergeant. I and "sergeant-major," as he said, " just i met. the difficulty." Stations were called I corps. Then ' major " and " colonel " j j came for divisional officers, and at last j he himself, hitherto " general | dent," became " General," being so styled in a happy moment by a certain Captain ("adman, introducing him to a meeting. " I never took the title," he said near the end of his life. "It was forced upon j me by others in exactly the Mime way that I Christians were first so called at Antioch. j A few will remember a pleasant gather- j inc in the Parliament buildings at Wei- I lingtoii, when Richard Seddon assured the privileged guests what a splendid General | of the Salvation Army he would have made, and ilie General as confidently replied by saying how well he could have filled the position of Premier of New Zealand. Both claims are credible—up to a point; though they suggest possibly different experiences for the Army and for New Zealand. Each had a way with him, and could get things done. Here is a little piece of wood, some throe inches long—cut off a broom-handle, one might think—painted in mottled red and black, roughly pointed at one end. and cut square across at the other. When the East London Mission went out first with its banner, two men bore the device aloft, the poles resting in sockets on shoulder-straps. When they came back, they complained that the pointed ends of the poles were awkwardly loose in the sockets. Seizing a saw, William Booth cut off the ends in a trice, and each was kept as a memento of that day. What a day!—and what a characteristic act, performed with business-like promptness and dexterity, to make things serve!