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 5
FAMILY LIFE IN THE 'EIGHTIES 1880--1885
MRs. BOOTH'S health, which had always been indifferent, "grew slowly worse after 1884. She enjoyed long spells of energy and was often free from distress; occasionally, too, enthusiasm for a new remedy or a fresh treatment deceived her as to the real character of her sufferings. But she was carrying about with her the seeds of inevitable death.
There is something extremely pathetic in this long, obstinate, and courageous struggle of Catherine Booth. No woman that ever lived, I suppose, believed more implicitly in the unlimited power of prayer and in the perpetual interposition of Divine Providence; she relied far more on heavenly control than did William Booth, who held that God manifests His mercy in the discoveries of science, and that doctor and surgeon may be the means whereby the Almighty answers the supplications of humanity. To Catherine Booth, on the other hand, not only was there something suspicious about the medical profession, but she even regarded the anodynes of science as cowardly. God sent the sickness; God could remove the sickness if He would; at any rate, to bear the sickness without murmur was the clear and bounden duty of His faithful children.
But, unknown to everybody, Catherine Booth was smitten with cancer--cancer, as it afterwards proved, of a most malignant and painful order; all her prayers, and all the force and rigidity of her faith, though it helped her to an extraordinary degree in the bearing of her suffering, could neither arrest the deadly march of the disease nor abate one of its agonies.
It was inevitable that she should suffer, and sometimes for long periods, from a general inquietude of mind, an irritability of her nerves, the very suppression of which by her splendid will not only tried her strength but left her nerves inflamed to a degree of susceptibility sometimes almost as painful for others as it must always have been for herself. Noise became a torture to her. She struggled with all the force of her heroic nature and with all the energy of her unquestioning faith, to suppress her irritability; and she did suppress it so far that it never once became irascibility; but her condition as the years advanced became more and more nervous, more and more trying.
Her struggle with disease was like the struggle of religion in that period of profound transition. She clung to an inherited notion of Providence which all the sternest facts of life belied. With the refutation of this idea burning and consuming her body, she still proclaimed that faith. Science might reveal the laws of creative evolution, history might prove the rise of man--apparently self-aided--from savagery to civilization, theology itself might discover in the doctrine of the Incarnation a larger and, as some thought, a truer interpretation of God's character and purpose; but to Catherine Booth, in whose wounded body and heroic soul science, history, and theology could have found convincing evidence for their resistless logic, the old faith was still the true faith, the old notion of an interposing Providence was still the only true notion, and she was ready to die in the pangs of excruciating torture to vindicate the truth of this traditional aspect of religion.
Men have now passed from the dark Deism of that generation to a Theism which, whether it be truer or not, at least commends itself to science and philosophy; mankind is more anxious and eager to discover the truth of things than to establish the theses or defend the creeds of its ancestry; but those most conscious now of the freedom of truth, most happy in the enlargement of spiritual vision, most certain of the ultimate triumph of the Christ Spirit, will be the first to admire the tenacity and heroic stubbornness with which the soul of Catherine Booth clung to that phase of religion with which, to so many noble souls --men, for example, like Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Radstock--appeared to be bound up the health and salvation of mankind.
To admire such heroism at a distance is not difficult; but to live side by side with it, day after day, year after year, is difficult to the point of torture. And when we remember that she who suffered so terribly and he who comforted and consoled so diligently, were engaged in proclaiming to the indifferent masses of the world God's longing to help, God's passionate desire to heal and restore, we may faintly realize the soul of their tragedy, so full of pathos, so shot with irony.
The more one studies this period of William Booth's life the more is our pity stirred, and our desire heightened and intensified to get at the heart and soul of the man. He was on the crest of the wave moving with speed to an almost world-wide victory of his cause; at the same time he was the mark of every suspicion and every calumny that sectarian and atheistical enmity could suggest; and in his home, hidden from the eyes of the world, there was this tragedy of the beloved of his soul suffering, in spite of his prayers, in spite of her prayers, suffering as the years advanced the very sharpest of pain, and refusing to believe that God would fail her.
A lady who remembers the family life of the Booths at this time, when I asked for a description of the home, replied with a smile, "It was like a railway-station." And she proceeded to tell me that one of the distresses of Catherine Booth in her later years was the sacrifice of her once orderly home to the insistent demands of the Salvation Army.
"Mrs. Booth," she said to me, "was an admirable manager, and while the family lived in Gore Road she controlled the household and kept things in wonderful order. But with the move from Clapton Common to Rookwood, another house in Clapton, in 1885, the character of the house gradually changed. Everything had to give way to the Army. Family life, I may say, vanished at one gulp into the mouth of the Army. At any rate, the games and fun which had enlivened the children's evenings vanished for ever. Occasionally a game of croquet was played in the garden, and the General, who never looked on at anything, would field the balls 'to help things along.' But there was very little play of any kind. The General, you see, was organizing from morning to night--with an immense correspondence; Mrs. Booth was preaching or giving addresses up and down the country; Bramwell, Bailington, and Catherine and Emma were all engaged in public work; the younger children were helping the Army at home and longing to be full-fledged Salvationists. To visit the Booths in those days was to find yourself in a vortex. But I really cannot liken the house to anything better than a railway-station. There was a ceaseless coming and going. Something was always happening; something was always going to happen. On every side there was a rush, a bustle, and a commotion. People called, telegrams arrived, messengers came and went. Meals were served when they could be served, and were bolted rather than eaten. Some one was starting on a journey; some one was arriving; and some one else was arriving only to start off immediately. You cannot imagine the agitation. And poor Mrs. Booth, to whom order and discipline had ever been essentials in life, looked on in despair at all this and grieved because to direct such a storm was now beyond her powers. There was little attention to meals; no mending of stockings; no care of furniture. It was bad for the rest of the family, and poor Mrs. Booth knew it, and grieved over it."
William Booth gave a description of these new houses on Clapton Common to Mr. Henry Reed, in breaking the news that he had purchased one of them for £1,260, because his wife "longed after" it:
They look on to the Common, and the tram-cars passing in the distance, the children at play, the cows grazing, dogs swimming about the pond, all together make the look-out quite lively, and this suits my dear wife's brain and helps her through many an otherwise sad hour.
It was first in this house on Clapton Common, and then at Rookwood, that the Booths fashioned the Salvation Army during the most critical years of its existence, struggling at the same time to live their family life. The girls, we are told, were not "domesticated"; and their bedrooms are likened to offices--used only for the business of life. It is at this period, too, that one catches glimpses of William Booth which reveal some of the most interesting aspects of his character. Outside the pages of Charles Dickens no such household, I am inclined to think, ever existed, nor in any suburb of London, we may confidently guess, has a more remarkable family ever been gathered under one roof.
William Booth was the central figure and the master of the household. He inspired one, a visitor to the home tells me, with awe. But if at one moment he was blazing away at some unfortunate follower for stupidity or disobedience in his half-testy and half-humorous way, at the next he was comforting one of his younger children, or tending his delicate wife, or encouraging in the privacy of his study a penitent backslider. Every report of that period shows him as the life and soul of the house--sometimes the stormful life and the tempestuous soul, sometimes the most tender and gentle soul--but always the visible head and authentic master. His departures put everything into agitation; his arrival home was like the coming of a whirlwind. In his bedroom, where he kept a desk, he held important conferences; at the breakfast-table he examined his private correspondence; in his study he gave interviews to newspaper reporters, composed hymns, wrote sermons, drafted regulations and manifestoes, edited proofs, and encouraged his disciples. The Army was spreading across the world, but it was attacked on every side. And while this extraordinary man, suffering in body and mind, was directing the fortunes of his Army, answering its enemies, and composing its internal troubles, he was also comforting his stricken wife and fighting, very often amid great spiritual tempests, for the strength and consolation of a whole faith.
It is part of his tragedy that he was occasionally visited during these difficult years by that eclipse of faith which neither mystic nor saint (so far as I know) has ever escaped, plunging out of unearthly light into darkness black as death, losing the sense of spiritual reality, and feeling himself not only forsaken of God but inhabiting a universe where God is not. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? is a cry which has been wrung from the souls of honest saints down all the ages. To the mystic this terrible experience is so well known that it has lost its terrors, and he waits with folded hands and quiet breast for the return of the light; but to William Booth, the man of action, who knew little of the literature of mysticism, and who had rather taken the Kingdom of Heaven by storm than entered its gates with joy, this darkness of the soul was a symptom of something wrong within, and he agonized in his "might of the soul" and rent his heart with hands of violence.
His sufferings were hidden from the world. No evangelist was ever so impersonal. If he had stories to tell in public, they were the stories of other people. If he encouraged other men to bare their bosoms to the world, his own inmost bosom was shrouded by something more painful than reticence or restraint. Few men who have lived so public a life ever had more soul-sides. He showed to the man of the world one aspect of his character, another to the diplomatist who would negotiate with him, another to the journalist who came to him for an interview, another to the vast congregations he addressed all over the world. But while he was tolerant and generous and accommodating with the man of the world, and while he was a thunderer armed with the bolts of Jehovah when he addressed a congregation, only to his wife, and occasionally to some of his children, did he reveal that side of his soul which more than any other revealed the tide of his spiritual existence.
It was in his home that he burst into tears over the sufferings of children, the sins of the world, and the destitution of the poor. It was in his home that he dreamed his great dream of evangelizing the whole world, and wrestled on his knees in spiritual darkness for the vital sense of God's existence. It was here, too, that he spent long hours at the bedside of his stricken wife, praying with her, consoling her, consulting with her, and wooing her with a lover's tenderness. Here it was that the man most truly and frankly uttered himself; and it was here, far more than on public platforms or at the Headquarters in Queen Victoria Street, that he stamped upon his Army of Salvation the impress of his strong and stormful personality.
The family was now beyond the stage of childhood; the older ones were already in what they called the firing-line. No sign in the early 'eighties was visible of those ruptures which were later on to tear the heart-strings of this vehement but tender nature. He gave his orders, and they were obeyed; he punished, and no murmur of mutiny was heard. With children remarkable and headstrong, full of his own turbulence and his own genius, he was nevertheless the unquestioned head and the supreme autocrat.
Bramwell Booth, who married in 1882, lived close at hand and spent more hours of his life at the side of his father than in his own home. Commissioner Railton also lived close at hand and was in constant attendance, almost a member of the family. Ballington Booth, tall, handsome, and fiery, was now an evangelist rejoicing in the popularity which everywhere manifested itself at his appearance. Catherine Booth, doing hard work in France, was suffering persecution of an odious kind in Switzerland; Emma Booth, singularly able and attractive, was almost as passionate an evangelist as her mother; Herbert Booth was just beginning work and composing Salvation hymns and Salvation music; Eva and Lucy Booth, at present too young for the fray, divided their time between the dullness of a governess and the whirl of Salvationism.
There was now no game of "Fox and Geese" in that household; no romp after supper; no silkworms and rabbits in the garden. The bell was always ringing. Messengers were for ever coming and going. Work was incessant from morning to night. When the General was at home for the whole day, there was silence in the house during the early afternoon, for, whatever the business on hand might be, his nap after the mid-day dinner was a rule of existence. But for the rest of the day you heard the younger children murmuring their lessons in one room, the piano sounding from another, the stormful voice of the General booming in a third, and the scratching of Mrs. Booth's unresting pen in a fourth. Some one was always standing on the doorstep, food was always being prepared in the kitchen, portmanteaux were always being packed, and cabs were always arriving and departing.
There were still pets in this household--a dog, a canary, and cats. Eva Booth tells me that she never remembers her home without a cat. The dog at this time belonged to Eva, a child very dear to her father. It was a retriever, and went by the name of Nelson. One unlucky day an old charwoman--one of the odd characters whom Mrs. Booth was for ever discovering and introducing into her household--ventured to strike Eva Booth for pulling at some washed blankets which she had hung but a moment before to dry on a line in the back-garden. The dog, resenting this action, flew at the old creature and bit her in the arm. Orders were issued that Nelson should be shot.
The grief of Eva was wild and poignant. She tells me she felt that her heart was broken. In the midst of all his work the General found time to comfort the child. He sent for her early in the morning and had her to breakfast alone with himself; then she was told to put on her hat, and he carried her off with him to the City, telling her stories all the way about Welsh ponies. He kept her at his side throughout the day, and brought her back in his cab, still telling stories, late in the evening. And, in secret, he gave orders for Nelson to be converted into a rug, and when the rug arrived he gave it to the child as a surprise, telling her that she should keep it for her own. But at sight of Nelson in this pathetic condition Eva burst into tears. The General looked on for a moment with a lugubrious expression. Then he exclaimed, "Never mind, never mind!" and looking about him, called out, "Here, somebody; take it away!" and kicked the rug out of the child's offended sight.
The canary also belonged to Eva, and was so devoted to her that it would feed from her lips. This devotion was, however, of a jealous nature. When the General kissed his daughter the canary would fly at him, beating its wings against his face--a protest which always amused him. He loved all his children with a wonderful tenderness which was for ever breaking free from the obsession of his work to indulge itself in the simplicities of domestic affection.
In the midst of his work he would find time for brief confidences with his children. A phrase with him in those days was, "Gossip to me a bit," as if he refreshed himself after the strain of his labours in listening to the chatter of the young folks. He really did listen to their tales, and really did feel interest in their concernments.
When a dog belonging to the house had puppies, he took Eva on his knee, who was greatly excited by the proceeding, and said, "Now, tell me all about it." On one occasion a kitten was lost, and the General, hearing its mother crying for it at two o'clock in the morning, got up from his bed and searched till three o'clock, finding the lost kitten at last under a wash-tub.
He was a man who not only loved with his whole heart, but who loved to be loved. In his letters to this daughter in after years he was always, she tells me, "clamouring for love."
An old acquaintance from Nottingham who called to see William Booth in the City, in the 'eighties, full of admiration and hero-worship--for the Salvation Army had realized his own dream of the Church Militant--gives me a rather doleful, half-humorous, and yet an informing account of the visit. "The whole atmosphere of Headquarters was the atmosphere of business. I was conducted to a small glass-panelled waiting-room--a kind of rabbit-hutch. As I waited there, I could hear a man next door dictating a letter. His voice was hard, his delivery was quick and commercial. And when at last I saw the General it was to find him a flurried and busy man, with no time to waste, and no inclination to discuss spiritual matters. I had so much to say; and he so little time to spare. I went away entirely out of love with the Army, and it was not till many years later that I came to understand the exigencies of so enormous an organization."
William Booth, one can well imagine, with his great dream of evangelizing the world, had no time at all for curious discussions on doctrines, even of Entire Sanctification. Nevertheless we must agree that the mechanical stress of religious organization is disagreeable, and that even in so holy and splendid an ambition as seeking to gain the whole world for religion it is unhappily possible for a man to lose his own soul alive. William Booth was not blind to this danger. There were moments in his life, as he himself told me, when he looked away from the mechanism of evangelization and desired acquaintance with the large serenities of mysticism. He would remind others of the sanctity of spiritual things in the midst of his organization by interjected prayer, praying himself with two or three in his own office, and commanding all those engaged at Headquarters to cease work and pray for the blessing of God. But a man whose work was spreading all over the world as his was spreading at that time, and who knew as sharply and decisively as he knew the miseries and iniquities of mankind, would naturally postpone mysticism for a future day, for some expected, longed-for, and neverto-be-realized vacation. The immediate necessity was for ever under his eyes.
He had discovered that men rescued from sin could be made the most successful rescuers of sinful men. He had the services of such men, a constantly increasing host, entirely at his disposal. Between what he had already attained and a victory 'wide as the world itself there was now but one barrier--the lack of money. He became, and no one can wonder at it, more and more set upon the difficult business of raising the wind, and to raise the wind one must be himself something of a cyclone.
Every one who knew William Booth intimately could not fail to realize that he was by nature not only a very acute and able man of business--that is to say, a practical and hard-headed man of affairs--but something of a showman. He had a genius for making a noise in the world. He made a noise in the world, not only because it served a perfectly righteous purpose, but because it was his nature to attract attention and to arouse interest. He had no reticences in this matter. The world was "a perishing world"; to shout in its ear, to wave a danger-signal under its eyes, to strike it, back and front, to do any conceivable thing that would wake it from its sleep of death, this was not only a manifest duty, but a fine, valiant, and glorious way of spending life. However, one must be careful to observe that this showman of religion did not beat his big drum to get into his own cap the pennies of simple and foolish people. He threw himself into poverty with a real passion. He embraced hardship and persecution with an infinite zest. He demanded of all who would follow him suffering and self-sacrifice. There was nothing mean nor base in his soul; a man might shudder at his methods, yet could do nothing but pay reverence to his sincerity. Even when he permitted himself to use the wisdom of the serpent in his relations with certain rich men, his object was to enrich others, not himself. He refused gifts for himself again and again. He ordered his whole family into the firing-line, and gave those whom he most loved and cherished into the arms of poverty and suffering. He converted his home into "a railway-station," made his children the outcasts of religion, and used every scrap of his wife's vanishing strength for the furtherance of God's Kingdom. And himself a dyspeptic, between fifty and sixty years of age, no one was more full of energy than he, no one more impatient of excuses and laziness, no one more ready to go where the fight was hardest. He loved his life, and he believed with all his heart that God had given into his hands the key of salvation.
His sense of humour helped to keep him going. He was hotly indignant when persecutions were cruel and malicious, but for the ordinary attacks and criticisms of the world he was always ready with the defence of good-humoured laughter. "They only help to advertize us," he would say. Any man who wanted to bang his drum for him was welcome to do so. The great thing with him in those days was to keep the drum beating, to be for ever in the public eye, to be for ever a vital and striking part of national existence. His wisdom told him that a great spiritual offensive must never degenerate into or wear the appearance of a truce. One may say that he spent some hours of every day in watching for strings to which he might attach his kite of Salvation.
And this oldish man, fighting his great battle with the whole world, hiding the terrible tragedy of his heart from mankind, and going doggedly, stubbornly forward on his own way, would now and then look at himself in the glass and smile grimly at his tattered state, his woeful poverty. "I do hope the man will bring my trousers," he wrote to Bramwell, 1883, from a hydropathic establishment in Bushey Park. "I am disgraceful. Also post me a set of studs for Shirt front, and a collar-stud--a fair size. This is short and punishes my fingers. My coat is disgraceful, but I am not building a reputation on clothes--otherwise, what a fall there would be." Throughout his letters of this period we find constantly the phrases: "I am well, but very tired"; "I am awfully tired"; "this has been a heavy lift"; "I must have a little rest somehow. Where and how?"
In one of his letters (1884) he gives an amusing account of a provincial meeting:
For crowds and friendliness among the very poor and among the shopkeepers it was a long way ahead of the last one I had, which was certainly a superb affair. The roughs wanted to take the horses out when we started, to draw the carriage, which of course I refused to allow, thinking they might not draw us smoothly, and not quite certain where they would land us--chiefly because of the occasion it would give our pious friends for cavil! Mamma did the ride well until the last, when, after the march past, which was the worst managed thing of the lot, as the carriage was trotting fast away a lot of fellows would cling to the carriage; one fell and the wheels went over him, and Mamma saw him picked up and carried off. On enquiries at the Infirmary the doctors report he was too drunk to tell the extent of his injuries!
For the rest, his letters are almost entirely concerned with business. Wherever he went at this time telegrams, messengers, and communications from Headquarters pursued him. No one there, not even the loved and trusted Bramwell, ventured on any important departure without his orders. And when he returned from his triumphant tours it was to find a congestion of business awaiting him at Headquarters, visitors at home, attacks to be answered, an offended follower to be mollified, and the woman whom he loved beyond everything else on earth sinking more and more visibly into the shadows of death.
We might almost say that he fashioned the Salvation Army--for these were the years that witnessed the determination of its international character--at the open grave of his wife.
His one exhilaration in his home-life was music. In his bedroom conferences with Bramwell he talked nothing but business; at table, conversation usually turned on the lighter side of business, or else some discussion would take place about hydropathy or vegetarianism; but occasionally the autocrat of this household would call for music, and his children, nearly all of whom could play by ear, would run with excitement to the piano. Then an hour passed with joy and pleasure. This music was always evangelical music, and when a new tune had been discovered or composed by Herbert, the eagerness to hear it, the enthusiasm to learn it, and the freedom with which criticism was expressed gave vigour and vivacity to the party.
Music was still the chief pleasure of William Booth. He might not now run whistling upstairs or sing as he dressed, but when he was able to throw off the burden of his work, and his wife was able to bear the sound, he would call his children about him at the piano, and they would sing till it was time for bed.
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