“No laboured rhetoric,” said a Leipzig paper, “distinguished the speech, and applause was not won by catchy phrases.  The speaker talks like a plain man to plain people.  Everybody listens enthralled as he tells of his life’s work, of the unbounded love with which he would like to surround and lead to Salvation every one who lives and moves.  One gets to understand how this man could gather around him such masses of disciples, and why, right and left, many a lady deeply touched puts her handkerchief to her eyes and many a man wipes a tear from his cheek.”

Best of all, however, comes ever and anon in these reports the testimony that The General has not been a mere talker, like so many others of his day, but has raised up a real fighting force who have, by gradual painstaking labour and endurance, won for him this unbounded confidence in what he says of The Army’s religion.

“I remember,” writes one reporter, “how in the nineties, in Berlin, no Soldier, much less a Sister, could appear in the street without being laughed at at every step, made fun of, and even abused, and I visited Meetings in which there was great disorder.  But how the picture was altered a few years later!  Quietly and patiently the Soldiers let scorn and even assaults pass, until the very rowdiest of the Berliners were sick of it.  And on the other hand every one soon said that these people, after all, were doing nothing but to go right at the deepest miseries of the great cities—­that they fed the hungry, visited the sick, and generally carried out practical Christianity.”

“True,” writes another, “it is naturally not every one whose taste is pleased with the ceremonies of The Army; but before the world-wide, unending, unselfish work of the Salvationist every one feels like saying, ‘Hats off!’

“It was not mere love of sensation that led such a stream of men to the Princes Hall on Tuesday evening.  They wished for once to come face to face with the old General whose work they had learnt in the course of time to value.  Men of science, clergymen and officials and educated people generally, for once made The Army their rendezvous.”

And those who had heard the General before immediately recognised that they had not only to do with the very same resolute Leader, following the one aim with undiminished ardour, but relying upon the same old Gospel to win the world for Christ.

“He speaks,” says a Hamburg paper, “mostly with his hands behind his back, swaying gently to and fro.  The short, sharp English sentences are translated one by one.  It is the old recruiting talk of the chief captain in the fight against the sins of this world, the pressing exhortation to get converted at once, to-day, in this very hour.  It is the old entreaty to become a child of God, in spite of all opposition; the old call to purity of heart and life.  Whoever has wandered must come back again.  He who has