hearty and
devastating, have not yet brought the devil to his knees.

It is interesting to sit in conversation with this devoted disciple of
evangelicalism, and occasionally to lift one's eyes from his face to the
portrait of his mother which hangs above his head. The two faces are
almost identical, hauntingly identical; so much so that one comes to
regard the coachman-like whiskers clapped to the General's cheeks as in
the nature of a disguise, thinking of him as his mother's eldest
daughter rather than as his father's eldest son. There is certainly
nothing about him which suggests the old General, and his mind is much
more the mind of his mother--one of the most remarkable women in the
world's history--than the mind of his father.

Catherine Booth was a zealot and at the heart of her theology a hard
zealot. She believed that the physical agony of disease was a part of
God's discipline, and that humanity is called upon to bear that fierce
fire for the purification of its wicked spirit. She never flinched in
confronting the theology of Methodism. She was in practice the tenderest
of women, the most compassionate of missionaries, the most persuasive
orator of the emotions in her day; but in theory she was as hard as
steel.

Her husband, on the other hand, who threw Jehovah's thunderbolts across
the world as if he liked them, and approved of them, and was ready for
any further number of these celestial missiles, of an even vaster
displacement, was in his heart of hearts a wistful believer in
everlasting mercy. Few men have been born with a softer heart. He
sometimes wondered whether in framing the Regulations of the Salvation
Army he had not pressed too hard on human nature. To the horrified
scandal of his son, he even came to question, if only for a passing
moment, the ordinance which forbids tobacco to the Salvationist.

He used to say in his old age, ruminating over the past, "Our standard
is high. Our demand is hard; aye, very hard. Yes, we don't mince matters
in soul-saving. We demand the whole of a man, not a little bit of him,
or three-fourths of him, or two-thirds of him; we demand every drop of
his blood and every beat of his heart and every thought of his brain.
Yes, it's a hard discipline--hard because the standard is so high. I
hope it is not too hard."

His son has never once, so far as my knowledge goes, questioned even the
extremest of Salvation Army Regulations. The more extreme they are, the
more th