“Why he became a Salvationist is very clear.  He knew that the centre of life is the heart.  He saw that all efforts of statesmanship to alter the conditions of existence must be fruitless, or, at any rate, that the harvest must be in the far distant future of humanity, while the heart of man remains unchanged.  He suspected the mere respectability which satisfies so many reformers.  Even virtue seemed to him second-rate and perilous.  He was not satisfied with abstention from sin, or with the change from slum to model lodging-house.  He held that no man is safe, no man is at the top of his being, no man is fully conscious of life’s tremendous greatness until the heart is definitely and rejoicingly given to God.  He was like St. Augustine, like Coleridge, and all the supreme saints of the world in this insistence upon the necessity for a cleansed heart and a will devoted to the glory of God; he was different from them all in believing that this message must be shouted, dinned, trumpeted, and drummed into the ears of the world before mankind can awaken to its truth.

“He made a tremendous demand.  Towards the end of his life he sometimes wondered, very sadly and pitifully, whether he had not asked too much of his followers.  I think, to mention only one particular, that he was wavering as to his ban upon tobacco.  He was so certain of the happiness and joy which come from Salvation, that he had no patience with the trivial weaknesses of human flesh, which do not really matter.  Let us remember that he had seen thousands of men and women all over the world literally transformed by his method from the most miserable animals into radiant and intelligent creatures conscious of immortality and filled with the spirit of unselfish devotion to humanity.  Is it to be wondered at that The General of this enormous Army should scarcely doubt the wisdom of his first terms of service?

“But towards the end he suffered greatly in his own personal life, and suffering loosens the rigidity of the mind.  Those of his own household broke away from him, the dearest of his children died, trusted Officers forsook him, some of those whose sins he had forgiven again and again deserted his Flag, and whispered scandal and tittle-tattle into the ears of degraded journalism.  He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners.  Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable.  But he became more human and more lovable in these last years of distress.