it addresses.  It is not necessary to dwell upon the dislike—­we might, indeed, say the repulsion—­felt by serious and elevated minds at the paraphernalia, the pious turmoil, the uproar and ‘banalite’ of much that has developed under the Banners of The Salvation Army.  Prayers uttered like volley-firing, hymns roared to the roll of drums and the screaming of fifes, have been features of this remarkable revival which outraged many of the orthodox, and made even the judicious and indulgent ask whether any good could come out of such a Nazareth.  Nobody gave utterance to this feeling with greater moderation or kindliness than Cardinal Manning, when, while confessing that the need of spiritual awakening among the English poor was only too well proved by the success of General Booth—­that the moral and religious state of East London could alone have rendered possible The Salvation Army—­his Eminence added these grave sentences:  ’Low words generate low thoughts; words without reverence destroy the veneration of the human mind.  When a man ceases to venerate he ceases to worship.  Extravagance, exaggeration, and coarseness are dangers incident to all popular teachers, and these things pass easily into a strain which shocks the moral sense and deadens the instinct of piety.  Familiarity with God in men of chastened mind produces a more profound veneration; in unchastened minds it runs easily into an irreverence which borders upon impiety.  Even the Seraphim cover their faces in the Divine Presence.’

“Yet against what new movement of spiritual awakening in the people—­against what form of religious revival might not the same argument of offended culture and decorous holiness be employed?  And where would the lower masses of men be to-day if Religion had not stooped out of her celestial heights—­from the first chapters of Christendom until the last—­to the intellectual and moral levels of the poor and lowly?  In the sheet, knit at four corners, and lowered out of Heaven, there was nothing common or unclean.  If, as is practically certain, General Booth, by the vast association which he founded and organised, touched with the sense of higher and immortal things countless humble and unenlightened souls; if, in his way, and in their way, he brought home to them the love and power of Heaven, and the duty and destiny of men, then it is not for refined persons who keep aloof from such vulgar tasks to mock at the life and deeds of this remarkable man.  The particulars which we give elsewhere of his career show how, like Wesley, Whitefield, and Spurgeon, in this country, and like Savonarola, Peter the Hermit, and the Safi mystics abroad, William Booth, the builder’s son of Nottingham, was obviously set apart, and summoned by time, temperament, and circumstances for the labours of his life.  Like Luther, his answer to all objections—­worldly or unworldly—­would always have been, ‘I can no other’.  Meeting in Miss Catherine Mumford the wife who exactly suited him, and reinforced