There is violence in his mind and violence in his religion.  He believes in fighting the devil, and he delights in fighting him.  I will not say that there is more joy at Salvation Army Headquarters over one poor miserable brand plucked from the burning than over ninety and nine cheques from wealthy subscribers; but I am perfectly confident that the pleasure experienced at the sight of all those welcome cheques has its rise in the knowledge that money is power—­power to fight the devil.

No man of my knowledge is so strangely blended as this genius of Salvation Army organisation.  For although he is first and foremost a calm statesman of religious fervour, cool-headed, clear-eyed, and deliberative, a man profoundly inspired by hatred of evil, yet there are moments in his life of almost superhuman energy when the whole structure of his mind seems to give way, and the spirit appears like a child lost in a dark wood and almost paralysed with fear.  Not seldom he was in his father’s arms sobbing over the sufferings of humanity and the hardness of the world’s heart, mingling his tears with his father’s.  Often in these late days he is in sore need of Mrs. Bramwell Booth’s level-headed good sense to restore his exhausted emotions.  And occasionally, like Lord Northcliffe, it is wise for him to get away from the Machine altogether, to travel far across the world or to rest in a cottage by the sea, waiting for a return of the energy which consumes him and yet keeps him alive.

It is possible to think that this formidable apostle of conversion is himself a divided self.  His house of clay, one might almost suggest, is occupied by two tenants, one of whom would weep over sinners, while the other can serve God only by cudgelling the Devil back to hell with imprecations of a rich and florid nature.  This stronger self, because of its cudgel, is in command of the situation, but the whimpering of the other is not to be stilled by blows which, however hearty and devastating, have not yet brought the devil to his knees.

It is interesting to sit in conversation with this devoted disciple of evangelicalism, and occasionally to lift one’s eyes from his face to the portrait of his mother which hangs above his head.  The two faces are almost identical, hauntingly identical; so much so that one comes to regard the coachman-like whiskers clapped to the General’s cheeks as in the nature of a disguise, thinking of him as his mother’s eldest daughter rather than as his father’s eldest son.  There is certainly nothing about him which suggests the old General, and his mind is much more the mind of his mother—­one of the most remarkable women in the world’s history—­than the mind of his father.

Catherine Booth was a zealot and at the heart of her theology a hard zealot.  She believed that the physical agony of disease was a part of God’s discipline, and that humanity is called upon to bear that fierce fire for the purification of its wicked spirit.  She never flinched in confronting the theology of Methodism.  She was in practice the tenderest of women, the most compassionate of missionaries, the most persuasive orator of the emotions in her day; but in theory she was as hard as steel.