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For our Faces of the Army today, we reprint an article about William Booth that was published in The War Cry on March 27, 2004.
William Booth, the fiery evangelist who brought The Salvation Army in being in 1865, is now being recognized by historians as one of the most important leaders of the Victorian era.
Born in Nottingham, England on April 10, 1829, he was left fatherless at 13 and apprenticed to the drudgery of pawn broker’s assistant.
Young Booth had the profound religious experience of conversion at age 15 in a Methodist chapel, and became a boy preacher in the streets. Resolved that “God shall have all there is of William Booth,” the young soul-saver would not let church conventions and social snobbery stand in his way.
At 20, he left Nottingham for London, where he again supported himself by working in a pawnshop. His real life, however, was in the preaching and study to which he devoted himself after business hours.
On his 23rd birthday, he became engaged to Catherine Mumford and left business for the ministry. Although he led many in Lincoln and London to make decisions for Christ, he was still troubled and perplexed as to his future.
When he was 26, he married Catherine and they soon started raising a family. They were to have eight children.
Five years later, he resigned from the Methodist New Connextion when the conference ordered him to give up evangelistic work.
Filling in for another evangelist in tent services on an old Quaker burial ground in Whitechapel in East London, Booth discovered his life work-to bring knowledge of God to the masses of the poor. This decision resulted in formation of the East London Revival Society in July 1865, which soon became The Christian Mission and in 1878 became The Salvation Army.
After six years of laboring under difficulties in various temporary locations, the Army acquired, rebuilt and fitted an old saloon as a center for the work. It was soon followed by a much larger enclosure called “a people’s market” in Whitechapel Road.
Despite violence and persecution, the Army grew and developed into an international organization. Booth’s children played a vigorous role in its expansion, and two of them, Bramwell and Evangeline, eventually served as its General.
In 1890, Booth suffered a great bereavement-the death of his wife after an agonizing, but heroically endured, illness. At her funeral, he said:
“There has been taken from me the delight of my eyes, the inspiration of my soul, and we are about to lay all that remains of her in the grave. I have been looking at the bottom of it here, and calculating how soon they may bring and lay me alongside of her, and my cry to God has been that every remaining hour of my life may make me readier to come and join her in death, to go and embrace her in life in the Eternal City.”
Despite his grief, William Booth published the book In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1890. Written with the technical assistance of editor W.T. Stead, it contains Booth’s proposals for social reform, which included employment bureaus, vocational training, farm colonies, urban renewal, factories to supply work for the jobless, shelters for “lost women” and preventive homes for girls in more danger, legal assistance and bank services for the poor, improved education, model suburban villages, a travelling hospital, a missing persons bureau and a matrimonial bureau!
Always fundamentally grounded in religious faith, Booth’s interest reached out to education, housing, employment, health and the many problems of poverty. In advance of his times, he recognized that alcoholism must be regarded as a disease and its victims aided rather than condemned.
At age 62, General William Booth took his first world tour, including visits to South Africa, Australia and India. This tour was followed by many others. In his later years, honors crowded upon him, yet he sustained many sorrows and anxieties, particularly the tragedy of the death of his daughter, Emma, in a railway accident in America.
His last public meeting was in London’s Royal Albert Hall at his 83rd birthday celebration when he announced that he was “going into dry dock for repairs.”
He also declared during this meeting: “While women weep as they do now, I’ll fight; while little children go hungry as they do now, I’ll fight; while men to go prison, in and out, I’ll fight; while there yet remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight – I’ll fight to very end.”
William Booth died on August 20, 1912. Over 65,000 people viewed his body lying in state.
Through his vigorous, dedicated life, William Booth’s small band of followers has today swelled into an army of thousands in 109 countries. Since his death, it has always been guided by the spirit of its Founder, who believed that God was best served by those who served persons.
The article also included a small segment from Blood and Fire, William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army, by Roy Hattersley @ 1999.
William Booth’s success was building on a single-minded certainty. At first all that mattered was saving souls-a perfectly rational priority for anyone who believed that we are all born in sin, equally capable of redemption and destined for certain damnation if we fail to grasp the God-given chance of salvation. Poverty was the devil’s weapon…it drove men to drink and women onto the streets. In an age when even radicals believed that self-help solved all problems, William Booth knew that some men and women were pointed toward eternal damnation by the circumstances in which they were born and lived. Economic determinism-which is what it amounted to-owed more to Marx than Methodism. But William Booth, who never had time to waste on theories, was not concerned with the philosophical origins of his ideas. They were self-evidently true, so he accepted them.
Like John Wesley, his hero and spiritual progenitor, William Booth believed in “active Christianity”-the moral duty of God’s ministers to go out into the highways and by-ways and make them come in.
Tags: History, Faces of The Army