“It will not do to say that by adopting vulgar methods and appealing to vulgar people, General Booth established his universal kingdom of emotional religion.  Let the person inclined to think in this way dress himself in fantastic garments, take a drum, and march through the streets shouting ‘Hallelujah.’  There is no shorter cut to humility.  Many have tried to do what William Booth did.  Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken drugged humanity and render the Kingdom of Heaven a reality.  Many men have broken their hearts in the effort to save the Christian religion from the paralysis of formalism and the sleeping sickness of philosophy.  It is not an easy thing to revivify a religion, nor a small thing to rescue many thousands of the human race from sin and misery.

“Let us be generous and acknowledge, now that it is too late to cheer his heart, that General Booth accomplished a work quite wonderful and quite splendid, a work unique in the records of the human race.  Let us be frank and say that we ourselves could have done nothing like it.  Let us forget our intellectual superiority, and, instead of criticising, endeavour to see as it stands before us, and as it really is, the immense marvel of his achievement.  Our canons of taste, our notions of propriety, will change and cease to be.  The saved souls of humanity will persist for ever.

“I remember very well my first impression of General Booth.  I was young; I knew little of the sorrow of existence; I was perfectly satisfied with the traditions I had inherited from my ancestors; I was disposed to regard originality as affectation, and great earnestness as a sign of fanaticism.  In this mood I sat and talked with General Booth, measured him, judged him, and had the audacity to express in print my opinion about him—­my opinion of this huge giant, this Moses of modern times.  He offended me.  The tone of his voice grated on my ears.  His manner to a servant who waited upon him seemed harsh and irritable.  I found it impossible to believe that his acquaintance with spirituality was either intimate or real.  Saints ought to be gentlemen.  He seemed to me a vulgar old man, a clumsy old humourist, an intolerant, fanatical, one idea’d Hebraist.

“Later in my life I met him on several occasions, and at each meeting with him I saw something fresh to admire, something new to love.  I think that he himself altered as life advanced; but the main change, of course, was in myself—­I was able to see him with truer vision, because I was less sure of my own value to the cosmos, and more interested to discover the value of other men.  And I was learning to know the sorrows of the world.