And yet I am not sure whether a still more important part of The Army-making was not accomplished in the Prayer Meetings, and Holiness Meetings, which came to be more and more popular, until under the name of “Days with God” and “Nights of Prayer” they attracted, in many of the great cities of England, crowds, even of those who did not belong to us, but who wished to find out the secret of our strength, for it was by the light and help got in such Meetings that Converts became “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,” so that instead of merely carrying on a “Mission” for so many weeks, months, or years, many of them became reliable warriors for life.

How few of The General’s critics, who sneered at his Meetings as though they were mere scenes of “passing excitement” had any idea of the profound teaching he gave his people!  The then editor of “The Christian,” who took the trouble to visit them, as well as to converse with The General at length, with remarkable prescience wrote, as early as 1871, in his preface to The General’s first important publication, “How to Reach the Masses with the Gospel":—­

“The following pages tell a fragment of the story of as wonderful a work, of its kind, as this generation has seen.  No doubt it is open to the same kind of criticism as the sculptor’s chisel might award to the excavator’s pick; but I do not hesitate to believe that for every essential Christian virtue—­faith, zeal, self-denial, love, prayer, and the like—­numbers of the Converts of this Mission will bear not unfavourable comparison with the choicest members of the most cultivated Churches.

“There is not in this kingdom an agency which more demands the hearty and liberal support of the Church of Christ.  In the East of London are crowded and condensed a large proportion of the poorer labouring population of London.  The ruined, the unfortunate, the depraved, the feeble ones, outrun in the race of life, gravitate thither and jostle one another in the daily struggle for bread; thousands remain on the edge of starvation from day to day, and the bulk of these teeming multitudes are as careless of eternity as the heathen, and far more uncared for by the great majority of the professed people of God.  Mr. Booth’s operations are unparalleled in extent, unsectarian in character, a standing rebuke to the apathy of Christians, and a witness of the willingness of God to show His work unto His servants and to establish the work of their hands upon them.”

From the beginning, The General had taught his people to come together for an hour’s prayer early each Sunday morning, and to delight in prayer at all times, looking ever to God to deliver them personally from “all evil” and to “make and keep them pure within.”  These phrases were familiar to all English people; but that their real meaning might not only be taken in but kept ever before his people The General had established two weekly Holiness Meetings in the Mission Halls, one on Sunday morning and the other on Friday evening.  These practices, kept up wherever The Army has gone all these forty-five years, have resulted in the cultivation of ideals far above those usual even in the most refined Christian circles.