GENERAL BOOTH.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 478, 10 April 1909, Page 4

GENERAL BOOTH.

The wonderful old man who founded the Salvation Army, and who celebrates his eightieth birthday to-day, has for so many years been one of the njost notable men in the world that people arc apt to lose sight of tho almost miraculous character of his career. It is about fifty years since he began the work which he has since carried into every inhabited country on the globe. Society fifty years ago was not very different from society to-day in its attitude towards religious novelty. Beneath a surface of restlessness and readiness for change there was then, as now, a very firm resistance to anything destructively subversive of settled attitudes'and conventions, and General Booth encountered just that front of ridicule and anger which we all know would present itself if he were only beginning bis mission in this year 1909. In some respects the middle of the nineteenth century was favourable to the development of the noisy and hearty evangelism that was the beginning of the Salvation Army; if society then was more set in its ways, and less ready than twentieth-century society to tolerate the irruption of brass bands into tho quiet and decorum of religious practice, midVictorian people were much less sophisticated than their grand-children. Genkiui, Booth had to overcome ridicule, violence, coarseness, and official hostility; but he was at any rate spared the heavy task of overcoming the levity, scepticism and "knowing" suspiciousness that a new General Booth would find in the twentieth-century public. And he had succeeded in his mission, and had proved to every intelligent person the value of the Army, by the time that levity and scepticism had become general. Courage, ardour, indomitable faith, anda natural gift of leadership and extreme organising power were all necessary to his success. He was not improbably the only man of his time in possession of all these qualities in the required measure. Fifty years ago he was generally esteemed a rowdy preacher relying on methods which laid him open to ridicule; his methods have not altered, yet he is to-day the friend of princes, treated with courtesy and distinction by kings and emperors. Such a triumph over society is surely as miraculous as any happening can be. : •'Wonderful as are General Booth's personal qualities, what is still more surprising, though it is not generally considered so, was his insight in realising tho correct' channel into which to turn his energies and the manner in which to employ them. Nowadays we regard the Army's methods as quite natural and inevitable', like the electric tramcar and the telephone. But they are quite as wonderful as thoso useful inventions. To-day, at 80, the General is hale and vigorous, and as ready as ever to extend the enormous work of his Army. In his Scandinavian campaign, which is. referred to in one of our cable messages to-day, and which ho undertook immediately after recovering from a successful operation for cataract, he visited 17 towns and held 40 meetings. Ho actually has in mind tho possibility of purchasing St. Helena to establish a labour colony for discharged prisoners. It must be a great and enduring satisfaction to tlje wonderful old man that his Army is carrying out really efficient work for humanity all over the world, not merely in reclaiming men and women from lives of crime, but in dealing with the more material problems of modern industrial society.