“There is not a mill-owner in the place who does not want to get Salvationist workpeople, even to the boys of our Soldiers, because they know they can depend on them.  But to help us to get a Hall!  Ah! ’that is not in their line.’”

Therefore, the Treasurer and every Officer must go on week after week, with the miserable beg, beg, beg, which afflicts them, perhaps, even more than the most critical listener.  And then our great work must suffer both for want of the needed plant to carry it on, and from the appearance of too much begging, which, in so many instances, has undoubtedly hindered our gathering in the very people we most wished to help.

What stories of self-denial, not one week in the year more than another, any such Treasurer could tell!  How Officers managed to rear a healthy and promising family upon less than a pound a week:  how The General’s own granddaughters “made six shillings a week do” for their personal support, for months, because their Corps could not afford more:  how the Sergeant-Major’s wife did her washing during the night “before Self-Denial Week came on,” so as to be able to stand all day long outside the station, in the cold, collecting:  how widow Weak “keeps up her cartridges”; that is to say, goes on giving the Corps a regular subscription of sixpence a week since her husband’s death, as before, “lest the Corps should go down.”

Lately they took me to see a German widow, now suffering in a hospital, who when her whole weekly cash earnings outside only totalled two shillings a week, invariably “put in her cartridge” two pfennigs, say a farthing.  No.  I gave her nothing, nor did anybody else in my presence, as her needs are now attended to; and I am sure she would rather keep up the fact of never having received anything from, but always having given to, The Army.

Of course we do not pretend that all Treasurers and Soldiers are of the model sort.  If they were, many of our bitterest financial struggles would never occur.  If everybody who “kept back part” of what they ought to give to God were struck dead for singing such words as—­

    Were the whole realm of nature mine,
      That were a present far too small.

God would need many a regiment of corpse carriers, I fear.

The General, seventeen years ago, wrote to a wealthy lady who had been excusing somebody’s want of liberality to us by some of the slanders they had heard.

“Tell your friends in Gull-town the same that I am telling the public:  that nine out of every ten statements in the Press that reflect upon us are either out-and-out falsehoods or ‘half-lies,’ which are worse still; and that, though not infallible, when in one case out of ten we do make mistakes, there are circumstances which, if known, would excuse them very largely.

“I am having wonderful Meetings—­immense crowds, soul-awakening influences all day—­Penitent-Forms; back-sliders, sinners and half-and-half saints coming back to God.  Never saw anything, anywhere, in any part of my life, much more blessed.

     “Read my letter in The War Cry about the Two Days—­every word as
     from my heart.