LIFE of
The GOSPEL TRUTH WILLIAM BOOTH
FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL
of the SALVATION ARMY
by
Harold Begbie
1920
In Two Volumes
Volume 2
Chapter 33
CONCLUSION
WHEN the body of Charles Darwin was borne into Westminster Abbey it must have seemed to the sceptic that the dead naturalist entered that great Christian church as a conqueror; nor would he have seen anything to modify this ironical view in the fact that the Bible still remained on the lectern; he would have said that The Origin of Species had already made its way to the pulpit.
He would have found confirmation for this view thirty years later when he saw the doors of Westminster Abbey closed against the body of William Booth. If he witnessed the spectacle of multitudes in the streets gathered to watch the progress of this dead body to a cemetery in the suburbs, he would have dismissed it easily enough as the expiring flicker of emotionalism.
Two years later, looking back on the nineteenth century from the ruins of a war which was engulfing the whole world, the sceptic would have seen these two men, Charles Darwin and William Booth, in a strange and arresting juxtaposition.
He would have seen the one calmly and thoroughly laying the foundations of a philosophy which, manfully applied to human life, could have no other conclusion than war. And the other, almost in a frenzy of earnestness, neglecting no means, however extravagant, to attract attention, posting from one side of the world to the other with the only unanswerable antithesis of that philosophy. He would have seen the wise and prudent of the world following after the man of science, and the humble and poor following after the man of God. And he would have seen that while the one taught men a philosophy which could do nothing but ensure them destruction, and the other preached a religion which alone could save them from destruction, yet the tide of human thought set steadily away from salvation, flowing, imperceptibly at first, but afterwards in a flood, to the overwhelming of the human race.
A profounder view of these two men brings out a difference which is of significant importance. Charles Darwin was the most exact and scrupulous of thinkers, never publishing a word on any subject to which he had not given long and continuous thought, excluding from every sentence he wrote the smallest influence of his emotional nature. On the other hand, William Booth, trusting himself so largely to his emotional nature, and regarding the intellect almost with suspicion, spoke only with the single care that the words he uttered came from his heart. The one man addressed the heads of his contemporaries, the other their hearts; and while the one felt that the most precise and guarded phraseology was necessary for his utterances, the other took little thought what he would say or what he should write, trusting himself to a Power which science refuses to regard even as a remote hypothesis.
But in spite of his almost religious care for exactitude, and in spite of his most scrupulous regard for truth, the precise and careful thinker, addressing himself to the reasoning faculty in man, could not prevent that faculty from rushing away with his thesis to the abyss of destruction; so little faith can man repose in his reason. And, if the world had held its reason in leash, and given to the preacher but a tithe of the confidence it gave to the thinker, destruction would have been averted and a firm step taken towards millennium. These facts in their history men are in the habit of seeing only when it is too late.
No thinker of the last century exercised an influence over the mind of the world comparable with Darwin's; and no moralist of the last century exercised an influence over the heart of the world comparable with William Booth's. Unhappily for the children of their contemporaries, it was the influence of Darwin and not the influence of William Booth which determined the direction of human thought. The world of power gave itself up to the man of intellect. It turned its back on the man of emotion.
Darwin's thesis, developed to its inevitable conclusion by the rationalists of Germany, led the nations step by step to war; and not to a war such as semi-Christians waged in meeker times, but to a perfectly logical war of uttermost ferocity and extremest cruelty, a war in which chivalry and courtesy and mercy--qualities which do not belong to animals--were very properly swept aside, and men sought every means that their reasons could suggest for inflicting the maximum of agony and achieving the maximum of death.
It is a folly to say that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin. It is truer to say that he was the most discerning and honest prophet of Darwinism. If the theory of Darwin could be taken out of zoology and applied to man, or, rather, if man had no category of his own, but belonged to zoology and must be himself applied to Darwin's theory, then Nietzsche, far more than Karl Pearson or Herbert Spencer, saw to the end of this truth. Man, if an animal, must seek power; and in the struggle for power there can be no right but might, and no law but necessity. Struggle for existence does not end at the confines of the jungle in a world of logical Darwinism. To acquire, to possess, to dominate, this becomes the only rational drive of human intelligence when the incongruous moral nature has been thrown to the winds as a superstition.
Our fathers could not see this evident truth so vitally as some of their sons see it now. The last half of the nineteenth century witnessed an attempt on the part of religion, philosophy, and politics to effect a compromise with Darwinism. No man of any weight had the courage to denounce Darwinism as morally wrong, intellectually false, spiritually absurd. The most our fathers could bring themselves to do was to point out that the Mosaic cosmogony harmonized in some respects with the processes of evolution, and to patch the rotting garment of a combative civilization with the shrinkable cloth of philanthropy.
We see now that the theory of Darwin is a partial explanation of a few, and those not the most perplexing, structural phenomena of Natural History. We see that there is no light to be gained from that theory on the supreme problem of Beauty, that the tail feather of the peacock is still as great a mystery as when the contemplation of its delicate shading made Darwin sick with bafflement, and we see still more clearly that no light from that theory can help us to begin to understand the movement in man's mind towards beauty, renunciation, and moral perfection. These things we have seen at the innumerable graves of our children.
Prussia, in seeking World Power, has planted her iron heel on the doctrine of struggle for existence. Men are no longer deluded by phrases. They are very earnestly now using their hearts as well as their reasons, their moral natures as well as their microscopes; they see that Darwinism does not work. It does not work, and therefore it cannot be true. In the study it seemed true to think about "the struggle for existence"; but directly that philosophy escaped from the abstract air of theory, and was presented to men as a fundamental law of action, it collapsed, and in its fall dragged down the partial civilization of a sceptical, compromising, and dishonest Christendom.
There is something in nature that is not a struggle for the trough, something in man that is not a struggle for gain and gear. There is something in nature struggling for liberty, and something in man struggling for love. Moreover, in man, the individual person, there is a struggle between one self and another, a higher self and a lower self, a struggle which, from the days of David to the days of William Booth, has inspired the utterances of every man whose words have haunted the human race, a struggle for moral perfection, a struggle for the highest and uttermost good, a struggle to be fought to a finish at all cost to body's peace.
It was William Booth, more than any other of Darwin's contemporaries, who demonstrated that the spiritual nature of man is a fact of human experience. Others were more eloquent and more intellectually brilliant in arguing that the spiritual nature of man was at least a tenable hypothesis, but no man so decisively proved this spiritual nature to be a fact. In nearly every climate and among nearly every people, the most civilized and the most savage, he appealed to the moral nature of man, and by the power of his plea transformed the worst of men, even the lowest and the most abased, into good citizens capable of extremest self-sacrifice. He demonstrated that there is a force in human evolution of infinitely greater power than self-interest; that sympathy can heal the sick; that love can raise the dead; and that co-operation inspired by self-abnegation, and compassion inspired by self-sacrifice, can save the souls even of those whom an English follower of Darwin has described as "Social Vermin."
This great work, which history will remember was attacked by no individual so violently as by Darwin's fighting-lieutenant, professor Huxley, failed to avert the calamity of war. It failed to save the human race from that calamity; but in the light of war we see this work of William Booth perhaps with a new understanding and with a higher appreciation.
Civilization cannot stand on the sands of Darwinism. The rain has descended, the floods have come, and the winds have blown and beaten upon that civilization, and it has fallen, and great was the fall of it. Civilization can only stand if it is built upon a rock, and the only rock which can withstand the storms of the ages is the rock of the Moral Law. Man can no more leave God out of his philosophies than he can live without his heart or see without his eyes.
William Booth was one of the last century's greatest prophets of this truth, and certainly its boldest, most courageous, and most effective protagonist. His supreme interest for the historian lies in, the force with which his intuition carried him straight to the very centre of human knowledge in an age when men were allowing their intellects to lead them towards the abyss of annihilation. He saw the insufficiency of reason when it was at its highest in the estimation of men; and he saw the supremacy of emotion in a time when it was most suspected by men. He knew, with but little help from his reason, that the Infinite is not to be examined by the brain of any finite creature; and he knew, with only his moral nature to help him, that the Infinite may be clasped and held by the upstretching hands of love and faith. It was to him a matter for amazement that men could be content with only their reasons when they held in their possession those great forces of emotion which can lift the poet into regions where no astronomer can follow him, and the saint into transcendencies which neither philosopher nor theologian is able to penetrate.
We need not fear to minimize the greatness of the man by confessing that he fell short of the intellectualist standards of the age. But he is not to be judged by those standards. He does not stand in the company of intellectual giants--wrong-headed or right-headed. No religious genius has ever stood, or can ever stand, in that company. William Booth stands among the moralists, and his full stature is only seen when, considering the circumstances of his age, he is brought into comparison with the great emotionalists of history--those children of the world who have sought the salvation of men, not as men of science seek rational truth, but as lovers seek the beloved.
If he has no place among the intellectuals, he has equally, in the region of emotion, no place among the mystics. We approach the truth of his measure when we see that on the mountain top he was but a tourist, and that his abiding-place on earth was with men, in the pit of darkness and pain. He has left behind him no haunting tenderness for the sons of men, no words which they will remember in dark hours, no music which will steal into their souls when their eyes are blinded with tears. But he has left to the world the memory of a life which deliberately sought the pit, and in the pit worked miracles upon the souls of men by the force of a childlike confidence in God, and by the power of a love which, even if it be judged inferior to the love of the mystic, was nevertheless an infinitely more real and honest love than any carefully measured affection which had hitherto satisfied philanthropy.
The character of this love is the centre of his interest for mankind. It was determined in no small degree by the circumstances of his life. His childhood was clouded by suffering; his youth was fretted by deprivation and inhibition; and his early manhood was not only a hard struggle for physical existence, but an infinitely harder struggle for spiritual liberty. He came to his work out of this darkness and out of this suffering; he came to it with but little traditional refinement in his mind, and with still less of an imposed education which is worth speaking about; he came to it simply with a will perfectly surrendered to God, and with a heart that had no greater hunger than to sacrifice itself for his fellow-men.
He was in the religious world of his time something of a Charles Dickens. He was moved by pathos and humour; he loathed cant and abominated shams; he had a genuine compassion for the sinner; and he loved the poor with a love that was the very breath of his life. He sorrowed over the sins of the multitude not only because those sins expatriated them from the presence of God, but because those sins afflicted their bodies, darkened their minds, ruined their homes, and finally broke their hearts. He wanted mankind to be happier. His ideal was very like the ideal of Charles Dickens--domestic comfort on earth and compensation in Heaven. He wanted men to live in decent houses, with domestic love, with neighbourly kindness, and with faith in a future world. He wanted them to see how terrible it was that children should be hungry and naked, that women should be drunken and dissolute, and that the very best of men should sink beneath the level of the beast. He was not a revolutionist. He had little faith in the power of Parliaments to create Utopias. His idea of Utopia was not perhaps very inviting. But he loved men so honestly and so earnestly that in seeking to achieve his humble Utopia he performed the greatest of all human miracles.
It was William Booth who taught the world that the first thing to do in seeking to turn a bad man into a good man is to make him feel that you really care for him, really care whether he sinks or swims. If it be said that all notable evangelists, and even all orthodox preachers of religion, have uttered much the same precept in every age of the Church, we would venture to answer that no word in the language of men is more misused, more misunderstood, and more unrealized than the word Love. By which we mean, that it is the most difficult thing in the world for one person to love another; that the ocean which separates affection from love is all but infinite; and that to stop short at affection either in the domestic or the religious life is to live completely outside the revelation of God. "Were a single drop of what is in my heart," said St. Catherine, of Genoa, "to fall into hell, hell itself would be changed into paradise."
Love is so greatly the rarest thing in the world that few are even startled by the blasphemy which makes it a synonym for animal desire. It is so wonderfully the rarest thing in the world that we are amazed when we read of a person dying of a broken heart. And it is so entirely the rarest thing in the world that we are either greatly amused or greatly impressed when we encounter husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister, friend and friend, who perfectly and beautifully love one another. Happy families are common enough, but families in which the one relation between all the members is the relation of love--the love imperishably defined by St. Paul--are to be found perhaps but once in a life's long journey. Men, indeed, the makers of a civilization founded on combat, have not yet thought what it is to love; and for this reason more than all other reasons religion has failed to transform human existence. No word so common as love, no term so debased, no ideal so woefully unrealized. The love which is sublimely unconscious of self, which is for ever at rest, which is unshaken by events and unchanged by time, which seeks only the welfare of another, which lives its life in the life of another, which gives and gives again, never asking, never thinking to ask, for return, which is patient, which is tolerant, which is satisfied--this ministering and adoring love, at once human and divine, at once domestic and religious, this love which "bears it out even to the edge of doom," which seeketh not its own, which is the very centre and principle of the Divine Will, this love, we may say, has hardly yet become even an ideal of the human race.
Such love is one of the legends which have come down to us like inarticulate skeletons from an age bemused with romance; and in the welter of our modern life, in the clash of our social conflict, where the master passion is self-assertion, self-aggrandizement, and self-realization, this foolish memory of the past fades as the stars of heaven fade before the glare of our electric light. Perfect love, we say, is not to be expected; and yet Christianity is either perfect love or it ceases to be Christian. "The Christian ideal," it is said, "has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried." Really to love another person is difficult even for the best of the human race; but how difficult, how almost impossible, when that other person is infamous, degraded, and repulsive. Nevertheless, to read the Gospel in church, to pray for love, and to preach about love, making not one single effort of love in our dealings with the abandoned or the lost, is not this manifestly to live our lives entirely outside the Kingdom of Heaven? Christianity is, surely, this intense, unselfish, and ministering love or it is no whit different from the ancient religions of terror and superstition. "Many shall say to Me in that day!" And the judgment is, "I never knew you!" Nor is this judgment pronounced against the abandoned and the lost, but against those who professed the name of the Judge, and implicitly believed that they were doers of His will. "I never knew you"--that is to say, You did kind things without kindness; you wore indeed the garments of love, but there was no love in your hearts; that is to say, You never once saw the meaning of My life.
It is when we reflect upon this absence of love from the world, carefully considering in our minds the difference which exists between social kindness and self-sacrificing love, that we are able to see at least something of the greatness of the life of William Booth. His supreme contribution to the religious experience of mankind lies in his proof that by the power of love the worst of men can be changed into the best of men; but his highest and most enduring greatness is the genuine passion of love which urged him into the hells of human existence to work those miracles of conversion. He groaned over the degradation of men, he agonized over the debasement of women, he wept over the sufferings of children. Never has any man whose whole nature so recoiled from the sight of pain, and whose sensitive spirit so shrank from even a recital of grief, waded so far into the sea of agony. He suffered in helping the suffering. He was tortured in rescuing the tortured. And for every one he helped and rescued at the cost of suffering and torture which only God can compute, he knew that ten thousand others were perishing without comfort and without hope. The travail of his soul was not the travail of a hermit seeking in the solitude of a wilderness to comprehend the glory and the greatness of God, but the travail of a man living in the midst of human want and human sorrow, and with all the love in his heart being able to succour only one here--another there. And he suffered because of men's indifference and men's incredulity. He had proofs to show in every country of the world that love can transform the evil life and restore the shattered life; an enormous host followed him wherever he moved, shouting the hallelujah of triumph; but the world, for the most part, shrugged its shoulders, and left the suffering to suffer and the perishing to die. And in spite of the malignity which assailed him, the envy which traduced him, and the hatred which never ceased to compass his destruction, this love for the poorest, the lowliest, and lost persisted to the end of his life. His greatness is this, that among the many who speak of love he lived a life of love.
Fortunately for the enlightenment of the future and for the encouragement of all ages the documents left behind him by William Booth present to our gaze an indubitable likeness of the living and imperfect man. None of the mists which still creep towards us from the Middle Ages and obscure the portraits of the saints dim his rich humanity; nor is it likely that in days to come any forlorn worshipper of heroes will arise to invest this simple preacher in the ghostly robes of myth and legend. Aberglaube will not invade. He will confront for ever the gaze of mankind, a rough, fallible, and tempestuous figure, a man of little learning, a man of vigorous impulsiveness, a man masterful and vehement, a man inordinately zealous and inordinately ambitious, but a man inspired, and in everything one who with the whole force and passion of his extraordinary nature loved his fellow-men.
This love for his fellow-men will be seen as no perfect and beautiful aspiration in the vague region of impossibility; it will be seen, indeed, shot with the faults of his character and tinged with the hues of his human nature--never becoming the romantic love which sent Damien to the lepers, still less the exquisite love which made the very elements brethren of St. Francis; but when men contemplate the love of William Booth, steadily and dispassionately, remembering that this love manifested itself in the wretchedest and most hateful places of life, and at a time when rationalism was pouring its scorn upon emotion "that great and precious part of our natures," as John Morley calls it, "that lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding"--and that it ever groped its way into the black shadows where misery hides its tears, and into the outer darkness where sin deserts its victims, they will become conscious, in the greatness and strength of that dogged, unyielding, most stubborn and intensely practical love, of a beauty which at least consumes the faults of a day, and of a glory which at least does away with the shortcomings of a temperament. If he failed to avert Armageddon, more than any man in the latter part of the nineteenth century he helped to create the Social Conscience, without which there could be no hope of a League of Nations; and he helped to create that Social Conscience, not by a political formula or by any merely philanthropic invention, but by the force and energy of his boundless love.
Do we not come as close as is possible to the truth of this man when we say that had he been one of the Twelve, Simon Peter would not have been alone when he stepped out upon the Sea of Galilee?
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