Her husband, on the other hand, who threw Jehovah’s thunderbolts across the world as if he liked them, and approved of them, and was ready for any further number of these celestial missiles, of an even vaster displacement, was in his heart of hearts a wistful believer in everlasting mercy.  Few men have been born with a softer heart.  He sometimes wondered whether in framing the Regulations of the Salvation Army he had not pressed too hard on human nature.  To the horrified scandal of his son, he even came to question, if only for a passing moment, the ordinance which forbids tobacco to the Salvationist.

He used to say in his old age, ruminating over the past, “Our standard is high.  Our demand is hard; aye, very hard.  Yes, we don’t mince matters in soul-saving.  We demand the whole of a man, not a little bit of him, or three-fourths of him, or two-thirds of him; we demand every drop of his blood and every beat of his heart and every thought of his brain.  Yes, it’s a hard discipline—­hard because the standard is so high.  I hope it is not too hard.”

His son has never once, so far as my knowledge goes, questioned even the extremest of Salvation Army Regulations.  The more extreme they are, the more they please him.  It is one of his many good sayings that you cannot make a man clean by washing his shirt.  His scrubbing brush is apt, I think, to remove some of the skin with the dirt.  He believes without question that the only human test of conversion is the uttermost willingness of the soul to be spent in the service of soul-saving.  If a man wishes to keep anything back from God, his heart is not given to God.  He is no emotionalist in this matter.  He uses emotion to break down the resistance of a sinner, but when once the surrender is made reason takes command of the illumined soul.  He was asked on one occasion if he did not regard emotion as a dangerous thing.  “Not when it is organised,” was his reply.

The only concession he seems willing to make to the critics of the Salvation Army is in the matter of its hymns.  He confesses that some of those hymns are crude and unlovely; but examine this confession and you find that it is only the language which causes him uneasiness.  Approach him on the subject of dogma, the dogma crudely expressed but truthfully expressed in the worst of those hymns, and he is as hard as Bishop Gore or Father Knox.

He has been too busy, I think, to hear even a whisper from the field of modernism, though exaggerated rumours of what is taking place in that field must occasionally reach his ear and confirm him in his obscurantism.

Perhaps it is all to the good that he should be thus wholly uninterested in the speculations of the trained theologian.  He has other work to do, and work of great importance, with few rivals and no helpers.  By the machine which he controls so admirably, men and women all over the world, and usually in the darkest places of the world, are turned from living disastrous lives, lives which too often involve the suffering of children, and encouraged and braced up to lead lives of great beauty and an extreme of self-sacrifice.