So far from such variations being in any way discreditable to us, we think them one of the most valuable tests of the vitality and courage of our people, both Officers and Soldiers, that they fight on unflinchingly under such circumstances—­fight on happily, to prove that while fluctuations of this character are very trying, they often also open the way both to the wider diffusion of our work elsewhere and to the breaking up of entirely new ground in the old centres.

In brief, it is with us at all times a real warfare wherein triumphs can only be secured at the cost of struggles that are very often painful and unpleasant.  You cannot have the aggression, the advance, the captures of war without the change, the alarms, the cost, the wounds, the losses, which are inseparable from it.

A very striking and thoughtful description of some of the work done at one of our London Corps has recently been issued by a well-known writer.  I refer to ‘Broken Earthenware,’ by Mr. Harold Begbie.  No one can read the book without being impressed by the sense of personal insight which it reveals.  But how few take in its main lesson, that the Army is in every place going on, not only with the recovery but with the development of broken men and women into more and more capable and efficient servants and rescuers of their fellows.

That this should be so is remarkable enough as applied to Westerners, broken by evil habits and more or less surrounded by wreckage, but how much more valuable when applied to the teeming populations of the East!  There in so many cases there is no past of criminality or even of vice as we understand it to forget, but only an infancy of darkness and ignorance as to Christ and the liberty He brings.

Many of our best Indian Officers have been snatched from one form or other of outrageous selfishness, but thousands of our people there are gradually emerging from what is really the prolonged childhood of a race to see and know how influential the light of God can make even them amongst their fellows.  Ten years ago in Japan a Salvationist Officer was a strange if not an unknown phenomenon, but with every increase of the Christian and Western influences in that country, every capable witness to Christ becomes, quite apart from any effort of his own, a much more noticed, consulted, and imitated example than he was before.  In Korea, after a couple of years’ effort, we have seen most striking results of our work, and have just sent, to work among their own people, our first twenty married Koreans, after a preliminary period of training for Officership.  It is most difficult to realize the revolution involved in the whole outlook on life to men who have been looked upon as little more than serfs, without any prospect of influence in their country.