“There is one very common illusion concerning General Booth.  The vulgar sneers are forgotten; the scandalous slander that he was a self-seeking charlatan is now ashamed to utter itself except in vile quarters; but men still say—­so anxious are they to escape from the miracle, so determined to account for every great thing by little reasons—­that his success as revivalist lay only in his powers as an organiser.  Now, nothing is further from the truth.  General Booth was not a great organiser, not even a great showman.  He would have ruined any business entrusted to his management.  He would long ago have ruined the organisation of The Salvation Army if his life had been spent on that side of its operations.  Far from being the hard, shrewd, calculating, and statesmanlike genius of The Army’s machinery, General Booth has always been its heart and soul, its dreamer and its inspiration.  The brains of The Army are to be looked for elsewhere.  Bramwell Booth is the man of affairs.  Bramwell Booth is the master-mind directing all those world-wide activities.  And but for Bramwell Booth The Salvation Army as it now exists, a vast catholic Organisation, would be unknown to mankind.

“General Booth’s secret, so far as one may speak about it at all, lay in his perfectly beautiful and most passionate sympathy with suffering and pain.  I have met only one other man in my life who so powerfully realised the sorrows of other people.  Because General Booth realised these sorrows so very truly and so very actually, he was able to communicate his burning desire for radical reformation to other people.  The contagiousness of his enthusiasm was the obvious cause of his extraordinary success, but the hidden cause of this enthusiasm was the living, breathing, heart-beating reality of his sympathy with sorrow.  When he spoke to one of the sufferings endured by the children of a drunkard, for instance, it was manifest that he himself felt the very tortures and agonies of those unhappy children—­really felt them, really endured them.  His face showed it.  There was no break in the voice, no pious exclamation, no gesture in the least theatrical or sentimental.  One saw in the man’s face that he was enduring pain, that the thought was so real to him that he himself actually suffered, and suffered acutely.  If we had imagination enough to feel as he felt the dreadful fears and awful deprivation of little children in the godless slums of great cities, we, too, should rush out from our comfortable ease to raise Salvation Armies.  It would be torture to sit still.  It would be impossible to do nothing.

“This wonderful old man suffered all his life as few have ever suffered.  And his suffering arose from the tremendous power of his imagination.  At a Meeting he would tell amusing stories, and in the company of several people he would talk with a gaiety that deceived; but with one or two, deeply interested to know why he was a Salvationist, and what he really thought about life, he would open his heart,