“Now that his worn-out body lies awaiting burial, The General’s personal worth and the worth of his work are frankly confessed even by those who were once his bitterest critics. The Times had a leader in which it said that he rose from obscurity to be known as the head of a vast organisation ’well known over all the world, and yielding to him an obedience scarcely less complete than that which the Catholic Church yields to the Roman Pontiff.’  We wish The Times had followed The Standard in dropping the invidious quotation marks from the title, General.  William Booth was a great leader of men in a world campaign of individual and social Salvation.  Why reserve the title only for men skilled in the art of wholesale human slaughter?”

The Times, August 8, 1912

“The death of General Booth, which we announce with great regret this morning, closes a strange career, one of the most remarkable that our age has seen, and will set the world meditating on that fervent, forceful character, and that keen, though, as some would say, narrow intelligence.  Born of unrecorded parentage, educated anyhow, he had raised himself from a position of friendless obscurity to be the head of a vast Organisation not confined to this country or to the British race, but well known over half the world, and yielding to him an obedience scarcely less complete than that which the Catholic Church yields to the Roman Pontiff.  The full memoir which we publish to-day shows how this Salvation Army grew up—­the creation of one man, or rather of a pair of human beings, for the late Mrs. Booth was scarcely less important to its early development than was her husband.  Both of them belonged to the Wesleyan body, of which William Booth at the time of his marriage was a minister, though a very independent and insubordinate one; and deep ingrained in both was the belief which is a more essential part of the Wesleyan than of any other creed, the belief in conversion as an instantaneous change affecting the whole life.  Booth himself had been converted at fifteen, and at sixty he wrote of ’the hour, the place of this glorious transaction’ as an undying memory.  Out of this idea of conversion, as not only the most powerful motive force in life, but as a force which was, so to speak, waiting to be applied to all, arose the whole Salvation Army Movement.  It was not, of course, in any sense a new idea.  Christians had been familiar with it in all ages, and both the New Testament and the history of the early saints supply instances in support of it.  But Booth was probably more affected by more recent evidence.  Imperfect as had been his training for the ministry, he doubtless learnt pretty thoroughly the history of Wesley and Whitefield, and of the astonishing early years of the Methodist movement.  In his own youth, too, Revivalism was an active force, and he himself had been strongly moved by an American missionary.  His originality lay in carrying down the doctrine