e value of love. He believed that love
could save the very worst man and the very worst woman in the world who
wanted to be saved; and he also believed that nothing was so just and
wise as rigorous punishment for the unrighteous who would not be saved.
I think that he would have set up in England, if he had enjoyed the
power which we give to politicians, two classes of prison--the reforming
prison, controlled only by compassionate Christians who believe in love;
and the punishing prison, which isolates the evil and iniquitous from
contact with innocence and struggling virtue. In that direction this
most merciful man was merciless.

"Why he became a Salvationist is very clear. He knew that the centre of
life is the heart. He saw that all efforts of statesmanship to alter the
conditions of existence must be fruitless, or, at any rate, that the
harvest must be in the far distant future of humanity, while the heart
of man remains unchanged. He suspected the mere respectability which
satisfies so many reformers. Even virtue seemed to him second-rate and
perilous. He was not satisfied with abstention from sin, or with the
change from slum to model lodging-house. He held that no man is safe, no
man is at the top of his being, no man is fully conscious of life's
tremendous greatness until the heart is definitely and rejoicingly given
to God. He was like St. Augustine, like Coleridge, and all the supreme
saints of the world in this insistence upon the necessity for a cleansed
heart and a will devoted to the glory of God; he was different from them
all in believing that this message must be shouted, dinned, trumpeted,
and drummed into the ears of the world before mankind can awaken to its
truth.

"He made a tremendous demand. Towards the end of his life he sometimes
wondered, very sadly and pitifully, whether he had not asked too much of
his followers. I think, to mention only one particular, that he was
wavering as to his ban upon tobacco. He was so certain of the happiness
and joy which come from Salvation, that he had no patience with the
trivial weaknesses of human flesh, which do not really matter. Let us
remember that he had seen thousands of men and women all over the world
literally transformed by his method from the most miserable animals into
radiant and intelligent creatures conscious of immortality and filled
with the spirit of unselfish devotion to humanity. Is it to be wondered
at that The General of this enormous