been conceived, except by His own omniscient mind.

Oh, I

shall never forget one season in my life when the Divine glory eclipsed my spiritual vision and seemed to enrapture my soul with its lustre. Oh how truly dignified did any employments appear which could glorify God. I saw how rapidly the highest Archangel would dart from his starry throne down to this mean earth to remove a stone out of the pathway of a little child if such an act would glorify God, and oh I felt it the highest privilege of my being to be able to do it. I wish I could make you feel just as I then felt; but Jesus can, and He will if you ask Him. It was in secret communion with Him I realized the glorious vision, and if you wait for it, and cry as Moses did "show me Thy glory" He will come, and oh the comfort and the light which such a vision leaves, truly it lasts many days; even in the darkest moments of my subsequent experience I have traced its glimmer, and I believe Hell itself could not obliterate the views then given me on this subject. But oh how it tortures me to think it was given in vain, or nearly so. In vain! No, perhaps not, I still live, and bless God it may yet prove not in vain."

Pray for me, pray for me, and let us give ourselves to the promotion of God's glory, and let us ever remember that God is glorified in the full consecration of what we have, be it small or great; He desires not the increase of five talents for the loan of one, but a full, perfect consecration of that one to His own honour, and whoever renders this, He pronounced as hearty a Well done upon, as upon him who has received ten. I have often erred here, I will try to remember in future that all I have is all He wants; you remember it too, dearest, and be not anxious because you have not as much talent as this or that man, but only to have what you have fully sanctified, and you will realize the end of your existence as fully and glorify God as much in your sphere as Gabriel does in his; begin and pray for grace to "glory in tribulation and in weakness," that "the power and the excellency may be seen to be of God." Be willing to endure the thorn of felt insufficiency, and even inferiority to others, if His grace be only sufficient to make you useful in His vineyard. I believe it matters little whether we are employed in gathering the sheaves, or gleaning the straggling ears after the reaper; it is the state of the soul which fixes the value of the employment, not the employment itself; to glorify God is enough, in small or great things, according as the measure of ability and opportunity is ours. Let us try to fix our eye on this and aim at it alone.

But I have dwelt too long on this subject. I hope what I have said will be made a blessing to you, if so tell me for I have written it in great weakness, at intervals during the last two or three days, sitting in my easy chair with a dreadful

cough tearing me almost to pieces, but I find to write takes off the restlessness and weariness always attendant on recovery from severe illness. Read it sometimes during the week, and may God own even this weak instrumentality dedicated to His glory.

There are one or two more points in your last week's letters but I must leave them, except what you say about Mr. and Mrs. Shadford's kindness making it most difficult to leave. Certainly it must make it more painful to leave them as friends, but it must not operate as a servile feeling of obligation to interfere with your obedience to the dictates of judgment and reason; such an effect would make you unworthy of such friendship; for I cannot for a moment think that such an effect was sought; if so, that altogether alters the character of the act, the motive being double; but no, I believe it was an expression of pure friendship, and as such you must regard it and not allow a sense of obligation to shackle you. But I need not mention such a thing, I trust it is as far beneath you as me.

It is impossible to read this letter without admiration and without a feeling of deep reverence for the young and delicate woman who wrote it; but the chief impression it makes is concerned rather with the man to whom it was written. One perceives that an influence of the sweetest, purest, and most mystical character is at work, with all the quiet confidence of spiritual strength, on a nature primitive, headstrong, unruly, self-satisfied, and yet self-tortured by doubts a nature capable of greatness but susceptible also of ruin and failure. One sees that the mothering of William Booth has begun; that the embrace of a milder and a purer spirit is beginning to enfold itself about his life; that he is conscious of an inferiority which she supplies, and she in him of a superiority which she studies to enhance.

Something of the storm through which he himself was passing at this period of his life may be seen in the letters which compose the next chapter.

CHAPTER XIV

WILLIAM BOOTH TO CATHERINE MUMFORD

1853-1854

THE reader has already been warned to expect in the letters of William Booth a marked inferiority to the letters of Catherine Mumford. It is probably the greatest tribute to his character, particularly at the time with which we are dealing, that he was loved so earnestly and so beautifully by Catherine Mumford, that she deemed him worthy of the letters which she addressed to him. One must be careful to remember that he was a great man in the making, and that even a great man may be an indifferent letterwriter. Moreover, as Sainte-Beuve has warned us, things said in conversation become congealed in the process of writing, for paper cannot smile, paper is brutish; and his letters are largely an effort to express himself conversationally. One realizes, too, that in Catherine Mumford's hands these letters of the young preacher were warm with the man's life-blood, were instinct with his attractive character, were living with the magic of his presence; the paper was not brutish, for his hand had pressed it; the paper did actually smile, for his eyes had rested upon it. To her these troubled and often untidied letters were the utterance of a very real soul- the greatest soul she had encountered and their feebleness was but the awkward gesture of a giant who has put down his club to make a love-bow of a withy. She wrote to him on one occasion:

Do I remember? Yes, I remember all that has bound us together. . . . Your words, your looks, your actions, even the most trivial and incidental, come up before me as fresh as life.

The main interest of these letters is the revelation they afford, however crudely, of a man's struggle with his own soul. William Booth was not born a saint, any more than St. Augustine or St. Francis. He had faults; he had weakness; he had the roots of sin. One discovers in these letters,

even when the writer flies off to the religious phraseology of the day for a release from pitiless self-analysis, that he was fighting a very great, a very terrible battle for his soul's existence. They do not give one so easily and so movingly the same sense of conflict which one finds in the letters and very honest autobiography of Father Tyrrell; they are entirely devoid of literary charm; they do not deal with the niceties of scholasticism, nor mount into the empyrean of philosophy; nevertheless to one who reads with sympathy, remembering the distance which separated the one from the other, there is something of the same spiritual struggle, the same spiritual agony, in these rough letters of William Booth as flames like a living fire in the writings of Tyrrell.

It will probably come as a revelation to those accustomed to think of William Booth as the white-haired, gentle, and patriarchal head of the Salvation Army, that he had to fight for his faith, that he was often cast down into an abyss of despondency, that his heart cried out from the depths of an exceeding bitterness for the sympathies and consolations and domestic kindness of humanity. And yet reflection should surely convince us that so deep and boundless a love for mankind as that which characterised his life's work could only have emerged from tempest and peril of shipwreck, could only have come from agony of the heart and through blindness of tears.

That which must chiefly interest the student of this man's extraordinary career is the immense influence exerted on his spiritual development by the woman he loved; so great and high indeed in this influence, that one may even doubt if his name had ever risen above the level of ordinary preachers but for the constant pressure and the never-lifted consecration of Catherine Mumford's beautiful spirit. For the reader of these letters will perceive that not only was William Booth lacking in many graces of the soul, but that he was positively swayed at this time towards dangerous paths.

There was that in his surroundings, if not actually in himself, which tended to make him the mere popular preacher, the practised orator of unctuous phraseology, the seeker of notoriety. He was young, he was romantic-looking, he was poor. To be married to the woman he loved

so that she might talk over his sermons with him, among other things was a great temptation. Further, his health was extremely bad, physical effort was sometimes a torture to him, the discomfort of lodgings weighed him down and depressed him in body and soul. He longed for a regular income, however small, for a settled home, however modest. He thought that the unrest of his soul would cease, and that religious quiet would possess his heart, if he could be decently settled in life. But again and again, all through these most difficult, most crucial, and most formative years of his life, he felt the call of the Spirit, and knew that there was something ahead of him, something beyond a home and domestic comfort, something beyond the affection of friends and the popularity of the Methodist Church, to which he must struggle on, for which he must be prepared to make a sacrifice of every human wish.

His conflict was not of the intellect, but of the very life. He was not troubled about the schools, but about God and his soul. He did not have to wrestle in spirit for a ground on which he might stand firmly and utter a more or less compromising Credo; his conflict was to destroy in himself everything that warred against the will of God. To him there was nothing clearer than the injunction to sell all and forsake all for Christ's sake; but really to sell all, really to forsake all, this was the cross which pressed him to the ground. And sometimes when he cried to the heavens for light on his path, the darkness deepened. His hands knocked and beat upon the door, but it was not opened. He asked and asked again, crying out from the depths of his soul, but no answer was vouchsafed. Through all that time the way was not clear before his feet, and the ground on which he stood was as shifting sand.

Catherine Mumford also experienced these seasons of darkness and silence; but she was living a solitary life, and could patiently wait for the light to shine and the voice from heaven to speak in her heart. William Booth, on the other hand, was preaching to increasing congregations of people, he was declaring the good news, he was offering salvation, he was proclaiming the Kingdom. To him these periods of darkness and silence were infinitely more hard to bear than