GENERAL BRAMWELL BOOTH
. . . _for the generality of men, the attempt to live such a life
would be a fatal mistake; it would narrow instead of widening their
minds, it would harden instead of softening their hearts. Indeed,
the effort "thus to go beyond themselves, and wind themselves too
high," might even be followed by reaction to a life more profane
and self-indulgent than that of the world in general._--EDWARD
CAIRD.
Because General Booth wears a uniform he commands the public curiosity;
but because of that curiosity the public perhaps misses his considerable
abilities and his singular attraction. His worst enemy is his frogged
coat. Attention is diverted from his head to his epaulettes. He
deserves, I am convinced, a more intelligent inquisitiveness.
To begin with, he is to be regarded as the original founder of that
remarkable and truly catholic body of Christians known as the Salvation
Army. His picturesque father and his wonderful mother were the humanity
of that movement, but their son was its first impulse of spiritual
fanaticism. The father was the dramatic "showman" of this movement, the
son its fire. The mother endowed it with the energy of a deep and
tender emotion, the son provided it with machinery.
It was Mr. Bramwell Booth, with his young friend Mr. Railton abetting
him, who, discontented with the dullness and conservatism of the
Christian Mission, drove the Reverend William Booth, an ex-Methodist
minister preaching repentance in the slums, to fling restraint of every
kind to the winds and to go in for religion as if it were indeed the
only thing in the world that counted. William Booth at that time was
forty-nine years of age.
Again, it was Mr. Bramwell Booth, working behind the scenes and pulling
all the strings, who edged his father away from concluding an alliance
with the Church of England in the early eighties. Archbishop Benson was
anxious to conclude that alliance, on terms. The terms did not seem
altogether onerous to the old General, who was rather fond of meeting
dignitaries. But Mr. Bramwell Booth would hear of no concession which
weakened the Army's authority in the slums, and which would also
eventually weaken its authority in the world. He refused to acknowledge
any service or rite of the Church as _essential_ to the salvation of
men. If the Lord's Supper were essential the Army would have it; but the
Army had proved that no other power was necessary to the working of
miracles in the souls of men beyond the direct mercy of God acting on
the centre of true penitence. He was the uncompromising protagonist of
conversion, and his father came to agree with him.
Neither the old General nor his inspired wife, admirable as revivalists,
had the true fire of fanaticism in their blood. They were too
warm-hearted. That strange unearthly fire burns only to its whitest
heat, perhaps, in veins which are cold and minds which are hard. It does
not easily make its home in benevolent and philanthropic natures,
certainly never in purely sentimental natures. I think its opening is
made not by love but by hatred. A man may love God with all his heart,
all his mind, and all his soul, without feeling the spur of fanaticism
in his blood. But let him hate sin with only a part of his heart, mind,
and soul, and he becomes a fanatic. His hatred will grow till it
consumes his whole being.
One need not be long in the company of General Bramwell Booth to
discover that he has two distinct and separate manners, and that neither
expresses the whole truth of his rational life. At one moment he is full
of cheerful good sense, the very incarnation of jocular heartiness, a
bluff, laughing, rallying, chafing, and tolerant good fellow,
overflowing with the milk of human kindness, oozing with the honey of
social sweetness. At the next moment, however, the voice sinks suddenly
to the key of what Father Knox, I am afraid, would call
unctimoniousness, the eyelids flutter like the wings of a butterfly, the
whole plump pendulous face appears to vibrate with emotion, the body
becomes stiff with feeling, the lips depressed with tragedy, and the
dark eyes shine with the suppressed tears of an unimaginable pathos.
In both of these moments there is no pretence. The two manners represent
two genuine aspects of his soul in its commerce with mankind. He
believes that the world likes to be clapped on the shoulder, to be
rallied on its manifest inconsistencies, and to have its hand wrung with
a real heartiness. Also he believes that the heart of the world is
sentimental, and that an authentic appeal in that quarter may lead to
friendship--a friendship which, in its turn, may lead to business.
Business is the true end of all his heartiness.
It is in his business manner that one gets nearer to the innermost
secret of his nature. He is before everything else a superb man of
business, far-seeing, practical, hard-headed, an organiser of victory, a
statesman of the human soul. You cannot speak to him in this practical
sphere without feeling that he is a man of the most unusual ability.
He can outline a complicated scheme with a precision and an economy of
words which, he makes you feel, is a tribute to your perspicacity rather
than a demonstration of his own powers of exposition. He comes quicker
to the point than nine men of business out of ten. And he sticks to the
main point with a tenacity which might be envied by every industrial
magnate in the country.
Moreover, when it comes to your turn to speak he listens with the whole
of his attention strung up to its highest pitch, his eyes wide open
staring at you, his mouth pursed up into a little O of suction, his
fingers pressing to his ear the receiver of a machine which overcomes
his deafness, his whole body leaning half across the table in his
eagerness to hear every word you say.
No sentiment shows in his face, no emotion sounds in his voice. He is
pure mind, a practical mind taut with attention. If he have occasion in
these moments to ring the bell for an adjutant or a colonel, that
official is addressed with the brevity and directness of a manager
giving an order to his typist. Instead of a text over his mantelpiece
one might expect to find the commercial legend, "Business Is Business."
Here, as I have said, one is nearer to the truth of his nature, for
General Booth is an organiser who loves organisation, a diplomatist who
delights in measuring his intelligence against the recalcitrance of
mankind, a general who finds a deep satisfaction of soul in moving
masses of men to achieve the purpose of his own design.
But even here one is not at the innermost secret of this extraordinary
man's nature.
At the back of everything, I am convinced, is the cold and commanding
intensity of a really great fanatic. He believes as no little child
believes in God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and the eternal conflict of
God and Evil. He believes, too, as few priests of orthodox churches
believe, that a man must in very truth be born again before he can
inherit the Kingdom of Heaven; that is to say, before he can escape the
unimaginable agonies of an eternal dismissal from the Presence of God.
But more than anything else he believes that sin is hateful; a monstrous
perversion to be attacked with all the fury of a good man's soul.
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.
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.
He does well, I think, to stick with the unwavering and uncompromising
tenacity of a fanatic to that centre of the Christian religion from
which was derived in the first two centuries of its great history almost
all impetus which enabled it to escape from Judaism and conquer the
world. It is still true, and I suppose it will remain true to the end of
time, that man born of a woman must be born again of the spirit if he is
to pass from darkness into light. This, after all, is the whole thesis
of Salvationism, and if General Booth wavered here the Army would be
scattered to the winds. As for his definitions of light and darkness, at
this stage of the world's journey we need not be too nice in our
acceptance of them.
But there remains the important question of Salvation Army methods.
It seems to me that here a change is desirable, not a radical change,
for many of those methods are admirable enough, particularly those of
which the public too seldom hears, but a change all the same, and one
deep enough to create fresh sympathy for this devoted movement of
evangelical Christianity.
I think it is time to stop praying and preaching at street corners, to
mitigate the more brazen sounds of the Army band, and to discountenance
all colloquialisms in Salvationist propaganda. I do not wish, God
forbid, to make the Army respectable; I wish it to remain exactly where
it is--but with a greater quietness and a deeper, more personal sympathy
in its appeal to the sad and the sorrowful.
General Booth is not the man to make these changes, but his wife is a
woman who might. In any case they will be made. Time will bring them
about. Then it will be seen, I think, that the Salvation Army is one of
the most powerful agencies in the world for spreading the good news of
personal religion among the depressed millions of the human race. For
even at this present time the lasting work of the Salvationist, the work
which makes him so noble and so useful a figure in the modern world, is
not accomplished by pageantry and tub-thumping, but by the intimate,
often most beautiful, and very little known work of its slum officers,
particularly the women.
Finally, concerning the General, he is in himself a telling witness to
one of the mysterious powers of the Christian religion. For he is surely
by temperament one of the most unstable of minds, and yet by the power
of religion he has become a coherent personality of almost rigid
singleness of purpose. In conversation with him one cannot help feeling
that he is jumpy and excitable; every movement of his extremely mobile
face suggests a soul of gutta-percha stretched in all directions by the
movements of his brain, and twitching with every thought that crosses
his mind; but at the same time one is aware in him of a power which is
never deflected by a hair's breadth from the path of a single purpose,
and which holds him together with a strength that may be weakened but
that can never be broken.
His supreme value for the student of religion is to be found in the
explanation of this unifying power. In spite of intellectual
shortcomings which might seem almost to exclude him from the serious
attention of educated people, he stands out with a marked emphasis from
the company of far abler men by reason of this power--this sense of
unusual vigour and abnormal concentration of strength. And the
explanation of this power, which unifies an otherwise incoherent
personality, is to be found, I am quite confident, in his burning hatred
of iniquity.
As a boy, like the poet Gray and the late Lord Salisbury, he suffered a
good deal of bullying, and thus learned at school something beyond the
reach of the Latin Grammar, namely, the brutality of human nature. He
has never forgotten that discovery. Indeed, his after-life has widened
and intensified that early lesson. Sin is brutality. It is selfishness
seeking its low pleasure and its base delight in vilest self-indulgence
involving the suffering of others, sometimes their profoundest
degradation, even their absolute destruction. Particularly did he
experience this burning conviction when he came to understand the
well-nigh inconceivable brutality of sexual vice. I believe that it was
a poor harlot in the slums of London who first opened for him the door
of fanaticism.
He had longed as a schoolboy to hit back at his tyrants, and now in the
dawn of manhood that long repression made its weight felt in the blows
he showered on the face of evil. For a year or two he was a wild man of
evangelicalism, leading attacks on evil, challenging public attention,
seeking imprisonment, courting martyrdom. It was from the flaming
indignation of his soul that Mr. Stead took fire, and led a crusade
against impurity which shocked the conscience of the eighties. But so
deep and eternal was this hatred of evil, that General Booth soon came
to see that he must express it in some manner which would outlive the
heady moments of a "lightning campaign." He settled down to express that
profound abhorrence of iniquity in terms of organisation. Tares might be
torn suddenly from the human heart, but not the root of evil. If he
could not kill the devil, at least he could circumvent him.
Such intense hatred of evil as still consumes his being is not popular
in these days, and may perhaps be regarded as irrational. But we should
do well to remind ourselves that while those who regard evil merely as a
vestigial memory of human evolution do little or nothing to check its
ravages, men like General Booth, and the men and women inspired by his
abhorrence, save every year from physical and moral destruction
thousands of unhappy people who become at once the apostles of an
extreme goodness.
Such evidences of mediocrity as exist in the Salvationist are purely
intellectual; morally and spiritually he is in the advance guard of the
human race.
DR. W.E. ORCHARD
ORCHARD, Rev. WILLIAM EDWIN, Minister of the King's Weigh House Church,
Duke Street, W., since 1914; b. 20 Nov., 1887; e.s. of John Orchard,
Rugby; m. 1904, Anna Maria (d. 1920), widow of Rev. Ellis Hewitt of
Aldershot. Educ.: Board School; private tuition; Westminster College,
Cambridge. Ordained, Enfield, 1904, B.D., London, 1905; D.D., London,
1909.
[Illustration: DR. W.E. ORCHARD]