LIFE of
The GOSPEL TRUTH WILLIAM BOOTH
FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL
of the SALVATION ARMY
by
Harold Begbie
1920
In Two Volumes
Volume 1
Chapter 5
WHAT HE BELIEVED AT THIS TIME
1845
IT is time to examine the theology of this seventeen-year-old youth, the theology which had changed the direction of his life and laid a powerful and constraining hand upon the impulses of his passionate nature.
At its centre this theology remained the religion of his long life, without change or modification of any kind. In the radius of its circumference there were changes--changes making for a less partial outlook on human life, and producing greater tolerance and deeper kindness in the heart of the man; but the centre was constant and unshakable.
He had been guided, he tells us, largely without human intervention, almost entirely by the Spirit of God, to perceive that the very soul of the Christian Revelation--making it a religion altogether different from every other religion and every other philosophy under heaven--is the divine miracle of conversion. And by conversion he understood a totally changed attitude of soul. He himself had experienced this mystery, he himself had been the human means of producing it in other people; nothing in the world was of such certain and absolute reality to his brain and heart.
[A well-known psychologist has argued that conversions are known outside the Christian religion; but the conversion which makes Christianity different from every other religion is the conversion which results in a life of love to God and unbroken service to humanity, particularly to the humblest and the most sorrowful.]
He became at this time impatient of political agitation, abandoned altogether his sympathy with Chartism, regarded his previous pleasures and amusements as the mere follies of childhood; nothing was of moment now but the mystery of conversion. To the drunkard and the sensualist who were striving to fight against their sins, he said, "It is useless for you to struggle, the sin is stronger than you; nothing can come of your efforts except defeat and death; but, seek a change of heart, surrender yourself entirely to God, leave it to Him to overcome your temptations, and you will find victory is yours."
He saw that temptations which were overpoweringly seductive to natural man, which became invested with all the glamour and magic of a strong passion to souls conscious only of their bodies, and striving only with human strength to contend against them, became instantly reduced to the impotence of their true triviality in the eyes of a soul really and profoundly conscious of God and Eternity. Conversion with him was the divine focus revealing all thoughts and all things in their absolute perspective. If, by the power of Christ, he had been saved by this simple miracle of conversion, and if such a creature as Besom Jack had been saved by the same means, then surely here was medicine for all the ills of the whole world and the true path to everlasting salvation.
He held then, and held to the end of his days, that directly a soul is converted--that is to say, directly the spirit of a man looks upon earthly life with the sure and certain knowledge that a living God exists, and that by faith in Christ he is brought into harmony with that God--temptation loses its power and the soul is impelled towards holiness. Other theological doctrines, with which now we need not concern ourselves, flowed from this fixed centre of his life; but this centre, this immovable and absolute centre, was the heart and soul of his religious existence. How a man was to gain conversion--this carried him into the field of doctrine; but the dogma of his daily life, the conviction of his active soul, was the central and illuminating dogma of a New Birth.
In a sense this dogma was faithfully preached at Wesley Chapel, was indeed the very spirit of contemporary Methodism. But it was held formally and preached, if not coldly, at least without passion. Above all things it was preached mainly to the converted. Here was the secret of life, the Open Sesame of distracted and perishing mortality, hidden away in respectable chapels and kept as a treasure by those already rich with blessings. But, outside Wesley Chapel: far and wide under the smoke of a roaring God-scorning city, stretched the slums and warrens and rookeries of Nottingham; and there men were living in sin and infamy, women going down to hell in a legion, children perishing like flies. Was no one to tell these doomed multitudes that the way to everlasting felicity was plain and straight before them? Was no one to go out into the highways and byways? Was no one to go as a physician to those who had no physician? Clearly some one must go to them; he and his friends would go; and since time was short, since the issues were of such awful importance, he and his friends would stop at nothing to rouse these miserable poor people to the glorious news of salvation. They must be told before it was too late. And yet when he went to them, at the end of his hard day's work, he found them for the most part indifferent to his good news, largely inclined to make a mock of him, in some cases definitely disposed to obstruct and molest him.
It would seem that he did not scrutinize this apathy or examine this antagonism. He was too young in years, too impetuous in temperament, too absorbed in the truth of his doctrine for calm and dispassionate reflection. Social wrongs presented themselves to his eyes, but not pressingly to his political conscience. Many years were to pass over his head before he admitted the political question to his mind and transformed it into a religious question. For the present he was a preacher of conversion, those who heard him had the power either to decide for God or to decide for the Devil--his business was to declare the truth and leave the rest with heavenly Powers.
One perceives that if he had been more strictly, rigidly, and exactly honest with himself--the rarest virtue in the world, and among headlong and impulsive natures almost impossible--he would have realized that conversion had not solved even in his own life all its difficulties and all its heartbreaking obstructions. He was very poor, in spite of incessant toil; he was rendered irritable and impatient by the blank prospect which confronted him; he was often cast down and utterly dejected by the misery of his physical existence. Conversion had saved his soul and sent him out to save the souls of other people, but it had not eased the burden weighing on his shoulders, had not cleared the horizon of banked and minatory clouds, certainly had not as yet flooded his soul with the peace that passes understanding.
But the boy of seventeen, an age when seriousness is rare and introspection is almost unnatural, stopped on his path for none of these considerations. His soul was certain of the one mighty fact that a spiritual change of most wonderful and divine power is produced by conversion, and his burning nature, as well as an iron sense of duty, impelled him forward to declare this Gospel of God.
He believed in hell, as he believed in hell to the end of his life, but whether he deliberately and full-consciously believed that all those who heard him and rejected his message would perish everlastingly in undying flames we cannot determine. It would seem that he did not at this period of his life penetrate below the surface of dogmatic religion, or trouble himself with any of those dark and awful mysteries which his practical common sense would inform him are insoluble to human understanding. He believed in God, he believed in Satan; he believed in heaven, he believed in hell; he believed that Christ had died to save sinners, he believed that without conversion no sinner could be saved--and there his theology stopped. It was the theology of Wesley, Whitefield, and of George Fox. It was the theology of the newly-born evangelical school in the Anglican Church. It was also the theology of an impassioned boy, headstrong and wilful, who had his living to get and his soul to save from damnation. Not a whisper had found its way to his mind of a possible ascent of man through a long and blood-stained cycle of ages from a state of animalism to a condition of comparative civilization; no blinding realization of astronomical discovery had startled his soul into the conception of a universe so appallingly mechanical and so infinitely vast that the mind at first shrinks from it with physical dizziness and a kind of spiritual anguish. No discipline of literature had made him sceptical of historical records and suspicious of words too big for human experience. No large or general acquaintance with life had brought him into knowledge of disabilities of temperament, inhibitions of heredity, the fatigues of middle-age, the necessity for human happiness. No "calm and critical theology" had paralysed his soul with doubts that are a check to enthusiasm, with compromises that are death to self-sacrifice and zeal.
To this youth, slaving for a paltry wage, with the hopes of a gentleman's life abandoned, all promise of his childhood utterly dissipated from before his eyes, the problem of human existence was simple and emphatic. This earth occupied the central place in the stellar universe; man, created in perfection, had chosen sin and had rejected God; God, in His mercy. had visited and redeemed man; man had it in his power, every man, to accept or to disdain that redemption; everlasting happiness would be the lot of those who accepted, everlasting misery the lot of those who rejected, the Divine mercy. This was his theology, the theology of his particular Church, the theology of all the Churches, the absolute and indubitable theology of the whole of Christendom. But William Booth believed in it with all the honest passion of his soul, and believing it so passionately and realistically, how could he go through life hugging to his soul the certainty of his own salvation, careless of, indifferent to, the equal certainty of damnation for all those who did not believe? He was too honest a man for that, too genuine a realist for such self-deception.
But not yet had his soul seized the fulness of the faith that was in him. He was very much set upon improving his worldly prospects; he was perfectly content that the greater part of his life should be spent in earning money for his self-support; he was satisfied if he gave his brief leisure to this work for the Kingdom of God. He differed from the great majority of his fellow-believers chiefly in this respect, that so intense was his faith in the blessing and necessity of conversion, so fixed was his conviction that a man was "saved to save," that he used every moment of his leisure to extend the knowledge of this truth. And because of this "the leading men in the Church gave him plenty of caution,"--afraid that he was "going too fast."
Back to BOOTH Volume 1 Index Page