The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1912. GENERAL BOOTH.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1524, 21 August 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1912. GENERAL BOOTH.

On April 10 of last year, General Booth's 82nd birthday, one of the London dailies said: "To-day General Booth is 82. That'is perhaps the only new thing that can be said of this truly wonderful old man who has for so long been a phenomenon and a monument." Greatness is not an easily measurable thing; it is what mathematicians would call a complex function of a great number of variables, and a man might be truly great without measurably influencing contemporary society. The founder of the Salvation Army, however, has left a deep mark upon his time, and he has at the same time conspicuously exhibited qualities of greatness such as can be found only in a few great statesmen or military commanders. Picturesque journalists have called him a humail dynamo, a wonderful machine, which is their way of saying that he has always been a tremendous worker, a great organiser with the bright and enthusiastic heart of a child. Today the Salvation Al-my is like the telephone in appearing to be a natural and almost indispensable feature of modern society, and it is only the .very oldest amongst us who can remember a time when the Army was derided and' persecuted, and its soldiers regarded, and treated, as lit subjects for correction by the Courts as disturbers, of the pcacc. In his early days General Booth had to facc an active opposition that is only less astonishing to the twen- y

tieth-century eye than the continued I and undiminished vigour of the organisation which has carried Chris-' liamty into many lands, which prints j literature and conducts services in 30 languages, which issues regularly many millions of papers, and whose officers alone number far niore than 50,000. When every allowance is made for the fact that General 1300TII selected just that method of 1 evangelism which would appeal to the masses of his day, there is left au enormous margin to his personal credit. Only a genius could have worked it out that mid-Victorian Jingland, unpromising a field as it appeared, was yet an excellent soil for the reception of_ the methods to which two generations now have been familiarised. it is easy enough to see today, what we noted when writing on the occasion of tho General's 80th birthday, that while mid-Victorian society was "more set in its ways, and less t ready than twentieth-cen-tury so'cicty to tolerate the irruption of brass bands into the quiet a.nd decorum of religious practice," yet at least General Booth was "spared the heavy task of overcoming the levity, scepticism, and 'knowing' suspiciousness that a new General Booth would find in the twen-ticth-century public." But who excepting General Booth could have diagnosed the case in England fiftyyears ago? Here, if ever, is an authentic case of the highest human genius. Having succeeded as a seer and prophet, the founder of the Army had to face the work of practical administration, and he has left, in an Army flourishing from Iceland to New Zealand, from Paris to Tokio, _ the marks of such an administrative genius as kingdoms and empires have rarely been able to discover for their own uses. The Army's work has often been very sharply criticised, but it is past all dispute that it has removed much sin and suffering from the world. The extension of. the Army's activities from simple evangelism to • social-political action was quite natural and inevitable, and great services have been rendered in this direction. There have been some failures, of course, but—and here we speak subject to correction—it will generally be found that the failures have arisen out of departures by the Army from its general rule of personal and individualist policy, Such a great machine as the Salvation Army has become will travel far even after General Booth's presence is removed. The Army lias created nothing new in society, and it never sought to create anything new. What it has done has been to use social facts and human elements that had never been harnessed up to Christianity until General Booth came upon the scene, and a great ' sum of good actually, achieved stands as a fitting monument to the efforts • of. a unique human figure.