The Salvation Army

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 20, 15 August 1891, Page 4

The Salvation Army

lit Harper's Magazine for s May, I Archdeacon Farrar devotes ten pages to an eloquent panegyric on the Salvation' Army, which he declares, whether we admire or despise it, must be admitted to be one of the most remarkable religious movements of this generation. He says : It began, in the labour of a single friendless . Dissenting minu>te>, without name, without fame, witkout rank, without influence, without eloquence ; a man poor and penniless, in weak health, burdend with delicate children, and disowned by his own Connexion ; it now numbers multitudes of earnest

evangelists. -It began in an East End ■rookery,, and* m less than twenty years it has gone " from New Zealand right round, to Ban FraHciaco, and from

Cape Town to Nordkoping." It has shelters, refuges, penitentiaries, food depots, sisterhoods, and brotherhoods already established in the alums. It lias elevated thousands of degraded lives. It* has given hope and help to myriads of hopeless and helpless outcasts, has received the sympathy of some of the best and highest men both in Church and State.' I think that even the bitterest, the most unjust, the most cynical of the laymen and 'clerics who have written to traduce and execrate it, might wish to .God. that in the life work of any one of them, they had done one thousandth fraction of good comparable in any one visible direction

to th'at ! Which hacLbeen wrought by General , Booth. ATphdeacon Farrar is reminded by the Salvation Army

;not:^ly^fjthe Tis^bf the Franciscans of .George Fox \Vesley, but of the apostles ;#n6¥eh ■success^ astonished and dispagan; world. How is it, Farrar, that an un"knowjaprejected, isolated worker has *trj^^jtHe^lighthing of life into the which -the -bones were so ■"di:^.?-; :; - ; '.He answers i this by poiuting ou^thaV the Salvation Army met an need, and ~ grappled with tliis-jtt^ed.by new and iinoonventional metfib|i. .He maintains that the Salvationists have lived far more in -Accordance with, the ideal of true ~Cans.tia.nity than the lofty and purpureal personages who have sneered at thein with such superior authority, ■If we^cbuld have had a few men in the /Church of England a'ud in the Nonconformist; Churches, such as ■General" Booth, we should have made the wilderness blo6som as a rose.