This effort, which in the year of its inauguration only produced 4,280, has in twenty-six years grown till it totalled in Great Britain in 1911, L67,161, and has so taken hold of the people’s minds and hearts everywhere as to produce even in poor little Belgium last year 7,500 f.

Perhaps it need hardly be explained that the system of special effort and special begging near the entrance to railway stations, and in all the most prominent places of the cities, which has grown out of this week, with the approval of Governments and Press everywhere, has done more than any one could have dreamt of to increase interest in the needs of others, and holiness and self-denial in attending to them.

And it is, after all, upon that development of practical love for everybody that The Army’s finance depends.

Merely to have interested so many rich people in The Army might have been a great credit to The General’s influence, but to have raised up everywhere forces of voluntary mendicants who, at any rate, for weeks at a time are not ashamed to be seen begging in the streets for the good of people they have never seen, is an achievement simply boundless in its beneficent value to all mankind, and limitless in the guarantee it provides for the permanent maintenance and extension of our work.

Do let me beg you to realise a little of the intense interest taken in our finances locally by all our Soldiers.  Did you ever get to know one of our Corps Treasurers?  If not, believe me, that your education is incomplete.  Whether he or she be schoolmistress in the mining village of Undergroundby, shopkeeper in Birmingham, or cashier of a London or Parisian bank, you will find an experienced Salvation Army Treasurer generally one of the most fully-developed intelligences living.  He or she could easily surpass Judas Iscariot himself, either for ability at bargaining, or for what we call “Salvation cheek.”  He considers the Duke who owns most of his county, or the Mayor of the city, is “duty bound” to help The Army whenever its Officer thinks a fitting moment has come to him to ask them to do so—­and the Treasurer never thinks that they already have helped us enough.

Every farthing his Corps has received or paid, for years past, has passed through his careful fingers.  In any city Corps I would accept his judgment about a “doubtful” coin before that of almost any one.  And no human being could surpass him in eagerness or care to get the very uttermost possible value for every penny spent.  Hours after great Meetings are over you may find him with other officers busy still parcelling coppers, or in some other way “serving tables.”  His own business or family would very often suffer for his late hours of toil in the cause, if God allowed that sort of thing.  But God has seen to it that many such a Treasurer has climbed out of the very gutter into a well-to-do employer’s position, because he sought first His Kingdom and His righteousness.