GREAT EVANGELISTS and TEMPERANCE

White Ribbon, Volume 19, Issue 11, 1 December 1947, Page 6

GREAT EVANGELISTS and TEMPERANCE

By VICTORIA GRIGG, M.A.

No people opposed the work of the Salvation Army at its commencement more than the publicans. In fact, in one town, the magistrate reported the charge sheet reduced to one-half as a result of the Salvation Army meetings. In this place, the publicans, alarmed at the decrease of their trade, offered the women officers £3OO if they u’ould transfer their efforts elsewhere. William Booth was born of humble parents in Nottingham, on April 10th, 1829. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a pawnbroker for six years, and surely the hand of God was in this, because it was here he learned so much of the miseries of the poor, and saw the havoc drink played with people’s lives. He longed to change their conditions. The sound teaching he received in the Methodist

Church made him form high standards for the application of religion to daily life. When he was nineteen, his apprenticeship having concluded, he passed through the severe trial and testing of a year’s unemployment. The experiences he suffered gave him sympathy with every man in such a position, and later on the Army w r as to care for the members of the “unemployed.” He decided at last to go to London to his married sister. Here, he was

X.—GENERAL BOOTH

shocked to find that his brother-in-law was a hopeless drunkard, and that his beloved sister had also become one of alcohol's victims. With this personal grief, and the vision of doilies pawned on account of drink, can we wonder that one of the first rules for his officers and members was that they should be total abstainers ? As he could find no other work, he had to return to pawnbroking, but at the same t*me he preached in the streets and park*. At the age of tw’enty-three he was ‘nvited to become the minister of a small group, one man guaranteeing him a salary of £1 per w r eek for three months. It was in this work that he met his wife, then Catherine Mulford, who came from a refined home. As a small child, she had always showm a desire to help anyone who suffered.

One day she saw a policeman taking a poor, dirty drunkard to the lock-up. A crowd of boys followed, jeering, but little Catherine walked beside him to the gaol, so that he should know that someone was sorry for him. The marriage of William and Catherine Booth was one of the great Christian marriages of all time. Together ihey commenced a great work for the poor and wretched of every description. What would our magistrates do, in many cases, if the Army

officers were not m court to take charge of some poor unfortunate who has made a slip. “Committed to the care of the Salvation Army” is a common term in our newspapers. When the Army began its work, its greatest opposition came from the liquor interests. A mild form was the throwing of buckets of water from upstairs windows on Salvationists having meetings below. A more serious organised effort was made in a large country town of which the Mayor was a brewer. The publicans made men drunk with an unlimited *uoply of strong drink, and set them on the Salvationists, the police offering no interterence. “Skeleton Armies,” bands of roughs, bearing for their insignia a skull and cross-bones, appeared in many places and attacked the Salvationists. Army officers and members were arrested and thrown into prison by magistrates who were often in league with liquor interests. The police thought it easier to lock up Salvationists than to deal with drinkmaddened mobs. However, cases where magistrates had unjustly sentenced Salvationists were taken to a higher court. A number of appeals were granted, and the same towns were publicly rebuked and ordered to nav the cost of the appeals. Every kind of evil from dishonesty to immorality was charged against General Booth and his Salvation Army hut he and they learned how to suffer and overcome, and meantime continued their triumphant work of winning the lowest back to God.

The Army rules are clear and definite. Officers and members must not drink, smoke, gamble, or run into debt, and these rules keep the Army standards high. Other churches could much profit and blessing follow the Army example in setting these standards for the conduct of their members. In addition *o the Army’s definite opposition to liquor interests, we find them conducting homes for those who have become drunkards. They have thr«e homes in New Zealand as well as in other countries. In ou; own country there is a home for men who are drunkards and drug addicts on Roto Roa Island, and a home for women in similar condition at Wellington.

There have been as many as a hundred men at a time on Roto Roa. and it has been estimated that about 77 % of he men and women who pass through these homes do not come before the courts again for drunkenness. What tragedy can be behind statistics. So rr any men, so many women, in home* for inebriates! Their plight brings grief and shame to mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers somewhere. Who looks after drink’s victims ? Is it the publicans and brewers, who make their foi tunes from selling this *>olsoll ? You and I know very 'veil that those who show them brotherly love are the men and women who arc themselves total abstainers. The officers of the Salvation Army

carry on their work in the spirit of Christ and their great founder, General Booth, and it surely needs the grace of God to spend one’s life among the outcast of society. They have their reward when men and women are set free from the enslavement of alcohol, and a greater reward still when some, alas, not all, take the greater step of yielding their lives to Christ. The testimony of the Salvation Army was wholehearted as to the improvement wrought by Prohibition in America. Evangeline Booth gave a graphic description of the difference on the first Christmas under Prohibition and preceding ones. Men who were formerly under the care of the Salvation Army at Christmas, through intoxication, were spending their time happily at home, and the Army had a much easier time. General Booth and his followers knew only too well that in their efforts to ameliorate social conditior'-, Drink was and is Public Enemy No. 1.

William Booth died in 1912. His last words to his son Bramwell are a message of love and hope and comfort to us all who labour in the cause of Temperance to remove the stumbling blocks from the way of our brothers and sisters. “The promises of God are sure.”