“My homeward walk, often alone through the dark, muddy fields and lanes,” he tells us, “would be enlivened by snatches of the songs we had been singing in our Meetings, and late into the night people might have heard my solitary prayers and praises.  ’Don’t sit up singing till twelve o’clock after a hard day’s work,’ was one of the first needed pieces of practical advice I got from my best adviser of later years.”

“But we never felt we could have too much of God’s service and praise, and scarcely regarded the grave itself as a terminus for our usefulness; for in the case of a girl who had attended our Cottage Meetings, and who had died of consumption, we lads organised something very like one of our present-day Salvation Army Funerals.

“Having ministered to the poor girl’s necessities during her sickness, comforted her in her last hours of pain, sung hymns of triumph round her bed as her spirit took its passage to the skies, we had the right, as her only friends, to order her funeral, and we resolved to make the most of it for the good of her neighbours.

“Although it was in the depth of winter, and snow lay thick on the ground, we brought the coffin out into the street, sang and prayed around it, and urged the few neighbours who stood shivering by, or listening at their doors and windows, to prepare for their dying day.  We then processioned to the Cholera Burial Ground, as the cemetery in which the poorest of Nottingham were buried was called, obtaining permission from the Chaplain to hold another little Meeting by the grave-side, after he had read the ordinary Service.  I cannot but feel that the hand of God was upon me in those days, teaching me how much lay preachers could do.”

How wonderful that the lad who did all that in the teeth of religious convention and opinion should have lived to organise just such battles and just such funerals all round the world, and to train hundreds of thousands of Soldiers of Christ to do likewise!  What a termination to his own career he was preparing all the time, when the City of London was to suspend the traffic of many of its busiest thoroughfares for hours to let his coffin pass through with a procession of his uniformed Soldiers a mile long!

With regard to the question of a “Call to the ministry,” that bugbear of so many souls, The General constantly expressed himself as follows:—­

“How can anybody with spiritual eyesight talk of having no call, when there are such multitudes around them who never hear a word about God, and never intend to; who can never hear, indeed, without the sort of preacher who will force himself upon them?  Can a man keep right in his own soul, who can see all that, and yet stand waiting for a ‘call’ to preach?  Would they wait so for a ‘call’ to help any one to escape from a burning building, or to snatch a sinking child from a watery grave?

     “Does not growth in grace, or even ordinary growth of intelligence,
     necessarily bring with it that deepened sense of eternal truths
     which must intensify the conviction of duty to the perishing world?