THE READER'S COLUMN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 293, 3 May 1913, Page 6

THE READER'S COLUMN.

GENERAL BOOTH. (Conducted by James Wortieyj. *"The Authoritative Life of General Booth," by George S. Railton, his i first Commissioner with a preface by General Brainwell Booth. (London: Hodder and Stoughton). The book is issued at half-a-crown net, printed at the Salvation Army Press, and is dressed in a red cloth cover with the Army insignia upon it. As its get-up suggests, it has been prepared by an officer of the Salvation Army chiefly for the information and use of the Salvationists themselves. Neither do I think will it become "the" life of tiie General. It has been written by one too nearly associated with him, not as Boswell was with Johnson, but in the sense of only seeing the General in the restricted sphere of the organiser and leader of the Salvation Army, to be able to do anything like justice to a man who stands head and [ shoulders over his fellows as a reformer !of the nineteenth and early twentieth [ centuries. This criticism does not mean to say that the book is by any means a ' failure. It is fully what it pretends to i be—a; plain account of the General's life, | with a concise chronological note of the principal events of that great career. But we do not get a fine setting of tne man, showing his position as a man of ' the times, and a perspective of him in his relationship to the world movements towards humanitaria&ism. We shall no doubt find William Booth's biographer in due course, and the General will then naturally take the position assigned him on the roll of fame, i EARLY LIFE.

Booth was the son of what we should to-day call a jerry-builder, a man who quickly ran up as many houses as he could, upon which he raised the maximum amount of mortgage, and when evil times came soon found difficulties. His early years were spent amid much financial stress and turmoil. Booth's father, crushed by failure, died prematurely, Slid the bpy owed most to the splendid courage and sanctity of his mother. Writing of her in 1893, he saya: " . . . So good she has ever appeared to me that I have often said that all I knew of her life seemed a striking contradiction to the doctrine of human depravity. In my youth I fully accepted that doctrine, and do not deny it now, but my patient, selfsacrificing mother always appeared to be an exception to the rule." About his conversion Booth■ writes thus: "I was led as a giddy youth of fifteen to attend Wesley chapel, Nottingham, and cannot recollect that any individual impressed me in a direction of personal surrender to God. I was wrought upon quite independently of human effort by the Holy Ghost, who created within me a great thirst for the new life." From this time during his apprenticeship he was continually taking services as a lay preacher for the Methodists. At twentythree years of age a way opened up for Booth to become a Congregational minister, but he failed with his trial sermons; neither could he preach the fierce, Calvinistic doctrines required, so he was apparently stranded when he received a call to take charge of a little Methodist community in Lincolnshire.

, THE BEGINNING OF THE ARMY. ' The General was riot a man to be cribbed- in the confined space of a country Methodist circuit, and he shortly moved to East London and commenced revival and street meetings such as we are familiar -with to-day. Having been invited to take' a tent service in Whitechapel for another missioner who was ill, Booth tells us: "When I saw those masses of people, so many . . . without hope in the world . . . apd accepting my invitation to kneel at the Saviour's feet, ,1 went home and said to my wife, 'Oh, Kate, I have found my destiny. These are the people for whose salvation I have been longing for all these years." That night the Salvation Army was I born.

ATTRACTING THE OUTCAST. The book gives us a good deal of information of the large crowds of outcasts he gathered to the Army flag, and readers can get a capital idea of what kind of folk these are by reading Begbie's "Broken Earthenware." Speaking before the Methodist Conference in 1880, General Booth said: "We do not fish in other people's waters or try to establish a rival sect. Out of the gutters we pick our converts, and if there is one man worse than another, our officers rejoice over that man." Commissioner Railton goes on in other chapters to deal with the commencement and growth of the Army in other lands—the General's visits to various parts of

the world —his co-operation with various governments on mutters of social reform. ' Other very interesting chapters (leal with Army finance, the spirit of the Army, the General as a writer, etc.. The great hulk of the matter will be fresh to any but those who are actively engaged in the work of the Salvation Army itself. The book concludes with the reprint of all the important newspaper notices of the General's death, and a list of interesting dates in I)is career.

SOME RECENT FICTION. *'"'Thc Wind before llio l);nvn," by Doll H. Mmiger. (London: Ilodder and Stonghton). John Hunter is a selfish, wayward man, Who, with a taking personality, -wins the all'ection of the finest girl in Kansas. Elizabeth Farnslniw, with her mother's bitter experience of married slavery before her, little expects to find in John a polished replica of her father. This is what Hunter proves to be, however, and it is a dreary road Elizabeth treads before she and John find the happiness of mutual love. John's notions of farming are too big; he plunges into expense after expense without consideration, and the mortgages are raised by Hugh Noland, who enters as a partner. Hugh, who has come to the country for health, never really gets strong, and dies, leaving his share to Mrs. Hunter. This gives Elizabeth economic freedom. The book paints a picture of domestic slavery on the part of wife and mother that is, we fear, far too common, and too little understood by mere man. There are some great and good souls in the characters of the book as well as some desperately mean ones. f'Naomi of the Island," by Lucy Thurston Abbott. (Boston: L. C. Page and Co; 1912). Naomi's story is one of self-sacrifice. Child of high degree, she becomes adopted into a fisherman's home. Mike Gleason is a man little to be desired, and he is drowned with his long-suffering wife quite early in the story. Naomi, by changing the locket she lias carried all her young life to the neck of little Beulah, allows folk to think that she and not Beulah is the daughter of the good-for-nothing Mike. Years go by and the children grow up. Beulah, with others, is ignorant of her real parents, an~ with the others looks down upon Naomi, because of her supposed parentage. But in novels, at least, things have a delightfully happy way of adjusting themselves, and Naomi comes to her own. *"Their Yesterdays," by Harold Bell Wright, author of "The Winning 'of Barbara Worth." (Chicago: The Book Supply Company).

This new publishing firm have dohe' well to secure a book of such a popular novelist as Mr. Wright. Still, this work is not properly fiction, and in it we have nojie i of, the delightful stories of the country ¥ofk "we* have "so much "en joyed "at this writer's hands. None the less, we have followed absorbing interest the psychological studies given. Tile book takes up what it terms the "th.ftteen truly great things of life," and gives us a mental picture of the way in which an ideal man'handles them. ,It then pictures the way in which ideal woman handles the great things. And these truly great things come to air in degree. They are Dreams, Occupation,, knowledge, ignorance, religion, tradition, temptation, life ( death, failures, love, memories. And' with each new ex-' perience we are carried back to dwell upon the memories of a past one, Such i a bald description, however, by no means gives a proper idea of the book, which is written with wonderful penetration and insight into human nature, sketching with care every mood of man, even the sub-conscious ones.

NOTES. Whitcombe and Tombsr-Ltd., have just issued Dr. Newman's new book. on. the Maoris. Hie firra arc building up a fine collection of publications dealing with the history of these Islands and their early inhabitants. Next fortnight I shall deal with Poster Eraser's new book on the Panama, which has just reached me. Livingstone's centenary is giving rise to quite a crop of literature on the subject of Africa, missions, race problems and the like. "Thinking Black is said to be a book on questions of religion and rate which is selling in thousands now at Home. J. Wardlon Thompson also deals in current papers with Livingstone's connection with the London Missionary Society, and sheds a good deal of new light upon the great explorer's, early life, by quotations from unpublished J ; etter3 in the archives of the Society. . (*) Books supplied for review by the 8.K., Devon street; (t) forwarded by Messrs Gordon and Gotcli, publishers, Wellington. •