LIFE of
The GOSPEL TRUTH WILLIAM BOOTH
FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL
of the SALVATION ARMY
by
Harold Begbie
1920
In Two Volumes
Volume 1
Chapter 8
THE CALL TO PREACH 1849
AMONG the disappointments which met our young venturer in London was the impossibility of getting work outside the pawnbrokery business. He had come now to dislike that business. He was as yet by no means anhungered and athirst to be free of secular labour that he might preach the Gospel of Christ; at this time he had seen nothing of London's destitution, nothing of those black depths where multitudes of human beings perish in darkness and sin; his experience of London was largely the experience of respectable and suburban London; and with this first impression in his mind--he was twenty years of age--his idea was to preach on Sunday and work for his living during the week-day, pushing his fortunes with all his might, for the sake of his mother and sisters, as well as for himself.
But there was no work for him, except his old work, and accordingly into a pawnbroker's shop in Walworth he went to earn his living. A new experience in religion awaited him here:
My new master very closely resembled the old one in many respects. In one particular he differed from him very materially, and that was, he made a great profession of religion. The first master was a Unitarian, knowing nothing about even the theory of godliness. I never remember him uttering a sentence that showed that he had any saving faith in God or any sympathy with godly people during the whole six years I was with him. My second master believed in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and in the Church of which he was a member, but seemed to be utterly ignorant of either the theory or practice of experimental godliness, and as to the spiritual interests of the dead world around him, he was as indifferent to their future well-being as were the vicious crowds themselves whom he so heartily despised. All he seemed, to me, to want, was to make money, and all he seemed to want me for was to help him in the sordid selfish task. So it was work, work, work, morning, noon, and night. I was practically a white slave, being only allowed my liberty on the Sabbath, and an hour or two one night a week, and then the rule was, home by ten o'clock, or the door will be locked against you. This law was rigidly enforced in my case, although he knew that I travelled long distances preaching the Gospel, in which he and his sanctimonious wife professed to believe. To get home in time, many a Sunday night I have had to run till out of breath, after walking long distances, and preaching twice in the day.
Some men might easily have been disgusted with religion in such a circumstance as this, particularly a young man whose heart was sore with disappointment and weighted with the difficulties which confronted him; but William Booth never lost by encountering hypocrisy; he gained by it; he never made the hypocrisy of others an excuse for relaxing his efforts, rather was he braced by it to show the true face of religion to mankind. In an age when there was almost a vogue of this odious religious hypocrisy, an hypocrisy so general that Dickens in his struggle to extirpate it flung himself into the fight with an impatient exaggeration which delighted the base and confirmed the feeble in their feebleness--in this age of deception and self-deception, of formalism, cant, smoothness, and detestable complacency, William Booth looked the distorted falsity in the face and saw only the beauty and glory of the reality. He deepened his own intense consciousness of religion by contact with the shallow pretence of a merely formal and professed religion. The less of truth he saw in others, the more hungrily he desired it in himself. To abandon religion, because of false religion in others, never so much as entered his mind.
But there were difficulties in his path:
My way was complicated, but I stuck to my faith and the preaching of it as far as I had the opportunity. It is true that here and there I made friends in my preaching excursions with whom I fraternized, as far as my little leisure afforded, enjoying occasional seasons of useful communion. But my poor heart was desolate in the extreme. It seemed as though I had got launched out on a wide and dreary ocean without a companion vessel or a friendly port in view.
Something of his state of mind at this period may be gathered from a worn and faded document found among his papers after death, the pathetic and honest confession of a young soul conscious of its weakness and seeking strength from a solemn and secret protestation of faith. This little paper bears the date December 6, 1849, and proceeds in this manner:
RESOLUTIONS I do promise--my God Helping--
1st. That I will rise every morning sufficiently early (say 20 minutes before seven o'clock) to wash, dress, and have a few minutes, not less than 5, in private prayer.
2ndly. That I will as much as possible avoid all that babbling and idle talking in which I have lately so sinfully indulged.
3rd. That I will endeavour in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of the bleeding Lamb, and by serious conversation and warning endeavour to lead them to think of their immortal souls.
4thly. That I will not read less than 4 chapters in God's word every day.
5thly. That I will strive to live closer to God, and to seek after holiness of heart, and leave providential events with God.
6thly. That I will read this over every day or at least twice a week.
God help me, enable me to cultivate a spirit of self denial and to yield myself a prisoner of love to the Redeemer of the world.
Amen & Amen
WILLIAM BOOTH.
I feel my own weakness and without God's help I shall not keep these resolutions a day. The Lord have mercy upon my guilty soul.I claim the Blood
Yes, oh Yes,
Jesus died for me.
Faithfully he performed the duties entrusted to him, making himself not merely useful but almost invaluable to his slave-driving master, for into everything they do it is the nature of such men as this to put the whole force of their powers; but it was only when he was free from the shop and out in the streets of London on his business of preaching religion that he really lived, and really hoped. Weak and delicate as he was, hard and exhausting as was his daily work, he gave himself up on Sundays and his one spare week-night to such preaching in the London chapels he visited as startled and shocked the polite congregations with the strength and fire of its rugged energy. And when the preaching was over, and he had fraternized for a few moments with the few who shared his enthusiasm, the Nottingham lad would take to his heels and run through the lamp-lighted streets of the suburbs back to the attic-bed above the shop in Walworth.
The more he saw of London the more insistent became this desire to preach the religion of Christ. So far as one can see, it was during these first months in Walworth that the suggestion made to him in Nottingham a year before by Samuel Dunn came home to his mind as a real and definite idea. The spectacle of the London streets, thronged at night by crowds of people who often appeared before his vision as godless and vicious and perishing, worked upon his imagination and quickened the idea that he should preach Christ, whatever might be the consequences to his earthly fortunes.
It must be remembered that the great temperance movement had not struck root at this period, and that the sights of London streets, particularly in the poorer quarters, were infinitely worse than they are now. Drunkenness was not only horribly common, it was every one's opportunitv for hilarity. It provided the humorous incidents of trans-pontine melodrama in the theatres, and the only break of cheerful comedy in the sordid tragedy of the streets. Women might be breaking their hearts at home, children might be crying pitifully for food and clothing, but the sight of uproarious men rolling and lurching home from the ale-house seldom aroused anything but amusement in those who turned the head to look after them.
And, again, there was no Education Act. The worst of the narrow grimy streets of London were thronged with ragged, barefooted, unwashed, foul-mouthed, and in many cases criminally-minded children, to save whom neither the State nor religion made scarcely an effort. The parents of these children were either the idle rascals of street-corners, or the sweated and exhausted victims of a conscienceless commercialism. A man could go but a little distance in London without encountering such men and women, and such helpless little children, as seem degraded out of the likeness to humanity.
To William Booth the call to preach Christ came in these London streets, not dramatically and suddenly, but with a steady and persisting tone of resolute command. He could not doubt the reality of that call, and his faith would not let him disobey it.
He has left a record of his feelings on this matter, written before he had really looked into the Stygian depths of the London abyss, and from this record one may discern how his mind was acted upon in youth by the sights he saw in suburbs that passed in those days for respectable:
How can anybody with spiritual eyesight talk of having no call, when there are such multitudes around them who never hear a word about God, and never intend to; who can never hear, indeed, without the sort of preacher who will force himself upon them? Can a man keep right in his own soul, who can see all that, and yet stand waiting for a "call" to preach? Would they wait so for a "call" to help any one to escape from a burning building, or to snatch a sinking child from a watery grave?
Does not growth in grace, or even ordinary growth of intelligence, necessarily bring with it that deepened sense of eternal truths which must intensify the conviction of duty to the perishing world?
Does not an unselfish love, the love that goes out towards the unloving, demand of a truly loving soul immediate action for the salvation of the unloved?
And, are there not persons who know that they possess special gifts, such as robust health, natural eloquence or power of voice, which specially make them responsible for doing something for souls?
And yet I do not at all forget, that above and beyond all these things, there does come to some a special and direct call, which it is peculiarly fatal to disregard, and peculiarly strengthening to enjoy and act upon.
I believe that there have been many eminently holy and useful men who never had such a call; but that does not at all prevent any one from asking God for it, or blessing Him for His special kindness when He gives it.
The call, at any rate, had come for him. It was a call from Heaven, but from humanity as well.
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