ey please him. It is one of his many good sayings that you cannot
make a man clean by washing his shirt. His scrubbing brush is apt, I
think, to remove some of the skin with the dirt. He believes without
question that the only human test of conversion is the uttermost
willingness of the soul to be spent in the service of soul-saving. If a
man wishes to keep anything back from God, his heart is not given to
God. He is no emotionalist in this matter. He uses emotion to break down
the resistance of a sinner, but when once the surrender is made reason
takes command of the illumined soul. He was asked on one occasion if he
did not regard emotion as a dangerous thing. "Not when it is organised,"
was his reply.

The only concession he seems willing to make to the critics of the
Salvation Army is in the matter of its hymns. He confesses that some of
those hymns are crude and unlovely; but examine this confession and you
find that it is only the language which causes him uneasiness. Approach
him on the subject of dogma, the dogma crudely expressed but truthfully
expressed in the worst of those hymns, and he is as hard as Bishop Gore
or Father Knox.

He has been too busy, I think, to hear even a whisper from the field of
modernism, though exaggerated rumours of what is taking place in that
field must occasionally reach his ear and confirm him in his
obscurantism.

Perhaps it is all to the good that he should be thus wholly uninterested
in the speculations of the trained theologian. He has other work to do,
and work of great importance, with few rivals and no helpers. By the
machine which he controls so admirably, men and women all over the
world, and usually in the darkest places of the world, are turned from
living disastrous lives, lives which too often involve the suffering of
children, and encouraged and braced up to lead lives of great beauty and
an extreme of self-sacrifice.

He does well, I think, to stick with the unwavering and uncompromising
tenacity of a fanatic to that centre of the Christian religion from
which was derived in the first two centuries of its great history almost
all impetus which enabled it to escape from Judaism and conquer the
world. It is still true, and I suppose it will remain true to the end of
time, that man born of a woman must be born again of the spirit if he is
to pass from darkness into light. This, after all, is the whole thesis
of Salvationism, and if General Booth wavered here the Ar