The mind that has never yet come in contact with teaching of this character can scarcely comprehend the effect of such thoughts on a young and ardent soul.  This Jesus, who gave up Heaven and all that was bright and pleasant to devote Himself to the world’s Salvation, was presented to him as coming to ask the surrender of his heart and life to His service, and his heart could not long resist the appeal.  It was in no large congregation, however, but in one of the smaller Meetings that William Booth made the glorious sacrifice of himself which he had been made to understand was indispensable to real religion.  Speaking some time ago, he thus described that great change:—­

“When as a giddy youth of fifteen I was led to attend Wesley Chapel, Nottingham, I cannot recollect that any individual pressed me in the direction of personal surrender to God.  I was wrought upon quite independently of human effort by the Holy Ghost, who created within me a great thirst for a new life.

“I felt that I wanted, in place of the life of self-indulgence, to which I was yielding myself, a happy, conscious sense that I was pleasing God, living right, and spending all my powers to get others into such a life.  I saw that all this ought to be, and I decided that it should be.  It is wonderful that I should have reached this decision in view of all the influences then around me.  My professedly Christian master never uttered a word to indicate that he believed in anything he could not see, and many of my companions were worldly and sensual, some of them even vicious.

“Yet I had that instinctive belief in God which, in common with my fellow-creatures, I had brought into the world with me.  I had no disposition to deny my instincts, which told me that if there was a God His laws ought to have my obedience and His interests my service.

“I felt that it was better to live right than to live wrong, and as to caring for the interests of others instead of my own, the condition of the suffering people around me, people with whom I had been so long familiar, and whose agony seemed to reach its climax about this time, undoubtedly affected me very deeply.

     “There were children crying for bread to parents whose own distress
     was little less terrible to witness.

“One feeling specially forced itself upon me, and I can recollect it as distinctly as though it had transpired only yesterday, and that was the sense of the folly of spending my life in doing things for which I knew I must either repent or be punished in the days to come.

“In my anxiety to get into the right way, I joined the Methodist Church, and attended the Class Meetings, to sing and pray and speak with the rest.” (A Class Meeting was the weekly muster of all members of the church, who were expected to tell their leader something of their soul’s condition in answer to his inquiries.)