“Look at him in his car!  There he sits, with a light-coloured overcoat buttoned round his neck, a grey forage cap pressed over his ears, his hands in his pockets, his eyes looking straight ahead, and his lips biting at his beard—­an old, old man in the newest of motor-cars.

“Through lanes where Wesley rode his horse, poring over a book as he went, General Booth flies in his beflagged car—­on the same errand.  These two men, so dissimilar in nature, so opposed in temperament, and separated by nearly two hundred years, the one on horseback, the other in a motor-car, sought and are seeking the same elusive end—­the betterment of humanity.

“One feels as one rides along our country roads with General Booth the enormous force of simple Christianity in this work of evolution.  One sees why Wesley succeeded, and why The Salvation Army is succeeding.

“‘We make too much of sin,’ says evolution.  ’We don’t make half enough of sin!’ cries The General.  Politicians and men of science seem like scene-shifters in the drama of life, and religion stands out clear and distinct as the only actor.

“’People have taken to The Salvation Army because it’s so kind to poor people,’ General Booth tells me; ’they know I love the poor, they know I weep bitterly for all the hunger and nakedness and sorrow in the world.  People know I’m sincere.  That’s it!  They know The Salvation Army is sincere, that it’s doing kind actions, and helping those whom nobody else will help or can help.  That’s what makes us popular.  Sympathy.’

     “But the secret of The General is not humaneness.  His secret is the
     reality with which he invests sin.  Hear him talk about sin, and you
     realise the man’s spell.

“At one moment he is full of humour and robust talk, a genial, merry, shrewd-eyed old gentleman; at the next—­at the mention of real sin—­his brows contract, his eyes flash, and his tongue hisses out such hatred and contempt and detestation as no sybarite could find on the tip of his tongue for anything superlatively coarse or ill-flavoured.

“‘Sin!’ he cries to me.  ’Sin is a real thing—­a damnable thing!  I don’t care what science calls it, or what some of the pulpits are calling it.  I know what it is.  Sin is devilish.  It is sin and only sin which is stopping progress.  It is sin and only sin which prevents the world from being happy.  Sin!  Go into the slums of the great cities—­pick up little girls of six years of age sold into infamy by their parents; look at the drunken mother murdering her child, the father strapping his cripple son—­sin!—­that’s what I call sin; something beastly and filthy and devilish and nasty—­nasty, dreadfully nasty.’

“As you listen and as you realise that The Salvation Army contains numberless men changed in the twinkling of an eye from lives of such