I was in
London, in the summer of 1885, I attended one of their monster meetings
in Exeter Hall. There was an enormous military band on the platform
behind the rostrum. Their Commander-in-Chief, General Booth, presided--a
tall, thin, nervous man, who looked more like an old-fashioned Kentucky
revivalist than an Englishman. His bright-eyed and comely wife, Mrs.
Catharine Booth, was with him. She was a woman of remarkable
intellectual force and spiritual character, as all must acknowledge who
have read her biography. Her speech (on the Protection of Young Girls)
was finely composed and finely delivered, and quite threw into the shade
a couple of members of Parliament who spoke from the same platform on
the same evening. When she made any telling point that awakened
applause, her husband leaped up, and gave the signal: "Fire a volley!"
Whereupon his troops gave a tremendous cheer, followed by a roll of
drums and a blast of trumpets. The chief agency which the army employs
to gather its audiences is music--whether it be the rattling of the
tambourine, or the martial sound of a brass band. Some of their hymns
are little better than pious doggerel, and they do not hesitate to add
to Perronet's grand hymn, "All hail the power of Jesus name," such a
stanza as the following:

"Let our soldiers never tire,
In streets, in lane, in hall,
The red-hot Gospel's shot to fire
And crown Him Lord of All."

Grotesque as are some of the methods of this novel organization, I
cannot but admire their zeal and courage in dredging among the submerged
masses with such spiritual apparatus as they can devise. They are doing
a work that God has honored, and that has reached and rescued a vast
number of outcasts. Their chief weakness is that they appeal mainly to
the emotions, and give too little solid instruction to their ignorant
hearers. Their chief danger is that when the strong arm of their founder
is taken away he may not leave successors who can hold the army
together. Let us hope and pray that the period of their usefulness may
yet be protracted.

While an abnormal agency, like the Salvation Army, may do some useful
service among the occupants of the slums, the greater work of reaching
and evangelizing the immense mass of plain, humble working people must
be done by the churches themselves. What do the dwellers in the
by-streets and the tenement houses need? They need precisely what the
dwellers in the brown stone houses