CHAPTER XVI

MARRIAGE, HONEYMOON, AND THE THEOLOGY OF

REVIVALISM

1855

ON the 16th June, 1855, William Booth and Catherine Mumford, both of them being twenty-six years of age, were married by the Rev. Dr. Thomas at the Stockwell New Chapel in South London. Mr. Mumford was present at this wedding and one of William Booth's sisters. No other minister assisted Dr. Thomas, and there was no congregation.

The honeymoon was spent at Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, the bride and bridegroom occupying those comfortable lodgings of which William Booth had heard a good account in the north of England. One week was devoted to this delicate foundation of married life, and then the Reverend and Mrs. William Booth, of the Methodist New Connexion, started off for a religious campaign in Guernsey.

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It is time to say that these revivals, into which the Booths threw themselves with an enthusiasm scarcely to be matched by the earliest Christians, rose out of a theological ground which was then universally accepted by the Church. Whether we may think that ground narrow or false, it was the foundational theology of the period ground, moreover, which no man could even reverently criticize without the startling consequence of finding himself numbered among the infidels. The Booths, standing on this acknowledged ground, were perfectly logical in their action; those who stood on the same ground, and yet contented themselves with a tepid discharge of formal duties, were guilty of the disastrous offence which English people are most ready to forgive, namely, an incredible lack of imagination.

What was this theological ground universally acknowledged by the Church? One can state it so mildly that it

may be accepted by the great body of orthodox Christians. even at this day; it can be stated with such brutal realism as might have startled even the flaming spirits of William and Catherine Booth fifty years ago.

In its mildest form this theology taught that entrance into Heaven could only be secured by faith in the Redemption of Christ; that man was so inherently corrupt in his nature that without the help of Almighty God he could do nothing to please Him: and that until he bowed his sinful will to the Divine Will, acknowledging Christ as his Saviour and Redeemer, he stood in dreadful peril of eternal damnation. In its more dogmatic form this theology taught that every human creature born into the world was under sentence of death, and that condemnation and wrath awaited those who refused to acknowledge the death of Christ as at once a consequence of their own personal guilt and an atonement for the sins of the whole world. Hell was indubitably regarded as the certain portion of all sinners, the just portion, indeed, of all who rejected Christ; and Hell was, also indubitably, pictured as a region of unspeakable misery which would endure for everlasting.

It must strike every honest mind that a man who entertained this theology and truthfully believed its implications must have had a heart of stone or a quite dead imagination to go quietly, peacefully, and contentedly about his business. To eat a meal when thousands were slipping into eternal Hell only a few yards from the table; to go happily to rest when thousands more were hurling themselves over the brink into those undying flames within a walk of one's comfortable bed; to stand at the reading desk or to mount the pulpit stairs with a written sermon in one's cassock-pocket, while thousands upon thousands of people remained outside the church doors satisfied with their sins, blackened with iniquity, and condemned to an unending agony of irremediable remorse surely this was to be illogical, incomprehensible, utterly unimaginative, dead to every vestige of feeling.

Far more logical was the action of revivalists. They not only professed the accepted theology of Christendom, but they lived their lives as if it were the veritable truth

of the universe. They fought Satan as if they saw him face to face; they struggled to drag the souls of men from the edge of eternal torment; they seized the shoulders of the sleepers and bade them wake and be saved; they could not rest, nor find lasting pleasure in life, while thousands of their fellow-creatures were sinking into everlasting ruin ignorant of the means of obtaining everlasting felicity; their whole existence was an agony to rouse the torpid souls of a perishing world.

There is really nothing to excuse in the fervour and incitements of such men as William Booth if we remember their honest convictions. On the other hand, the frigid and decorous lives of their orthodox contemporaries, if we consider their theological foundation, demand an apology so subtle and tortuous that it might baffle even the cunning of a Newman to give it any form of expression short of the grotesque.

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Sydney Smith's essay on "Methodism," which diverted. readers of The Edinburgh Review and gave an elaborate satisfaction to the erudite Establishment, makes no mention whatever of this foundational teaching of the Church. "The Methodists," he said, " are always desirous of making men more religious than it is possible, from the constitution of human nature, to make them." Whether he ever preached a sermon from the text, Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled," or from the injunction, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect," we do not know and are not greatly concerned to discover; but much would we give and to great pains would we most willingly put ourselves to ascertain the precise condition of the delightful and witty Canon's state of mind when reciting at public worship those pronouncements of the Church which declare the everlasting damnation of the wicked.

But the only serious question for the reader of this history concerns the honesty of the Booths. Did they really believe what they taught? Did they conscientiously and implicitly hold as the very truth of existence that escape from Hell could only be secured by faith in the

Atonement of Christ? Were they passionate and wholehearted seekers of the lost, burningly, unselfishly set upon the saving of souls, truthfully convinced that they held the commission of Christ; or were they merely the mountebanks of religious history, charlatans out for gain and notoriety, detestable hypocrites teaching what they did not believe, living clean contrary to their profession, laughing up their sleeves in secret at the victims of their cleverness? "We are for common sense orthodoxy," said Sydney Smith. What, then, were the Booths for? what was their share, if any, in this rare conjunction of common sense and orthodox religion?

The letters which have appeared in previous chapters entirely answer any reasonable question on the head of honesty. No unprejudiced person can read those remarkable letters without convincing himself that perhaps truer and more honest souls never lived than this obscure Methodist preacher and the woman who shared the burden of his vocation. It would be impossible for any man however malicious to prove them dishonest. Honest they were in heart and soul, too honest for their peace and comfort, too honest for their worldly prosperity. But, a more difficult question remains to be answered. One asks whether William Booth, William Booth particularly William Booth with his shrewd common sense and his obstinate self-questionings, his doubts and scepticisms even in the midst of the religious excitation which he himself had brought about whether he had honourably assured himself that what he proclaimed so loudly and so convincingly from the platform expressed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of God's relation with humanity?

The easiest answer to this question is supplied in letters written by the man himself in later life. He acknowledged that his outlook at this time was narrow; he confessed that he was guilty of ignorance and of inexperience. But by this he did not mean that he ever wished his early work undone, or that he had deceived himself in the doing of it; he meant that he had circumscribed his labours to religious circles; that he had not realized the immense part played

in human tragedy by ignorance and poverty and pardonable frailty; that he had not sounded so deeply as he came to sound with larger experience the boundless charity of God. He was a man, as we can never tire of emphasizing, whose mind developed and whose character ripened to the very last. He was always in the act of growth. Therefore, without personal bias of any kind, with an actual distaste for the violence and excesses of revivalism, one must acquit him of any degree of self-deception or any inclination to shirk the ordeal of a searching analysis of his beliefs. He believed, as his letters overwhelmingly prove, that any temptation to desist from seeking the instant salvation of his fellows, any inclination to modify his methods, any whispering doubt as to his future, his health, or his happiness, came from the enemy of his soul. Faith in Satan was tremendously real to him. He felt himself called by God; he knew himself tempted in a hundred directions from a perfectly pure response to that call; and those doubts and questionings, which his intellectual power was unable to face and answer, he ascribed, naturally and logically, to the forces of evil.

I believe him to have been as honest a man as ever found himself governed by a religious conscience. I believe him to have been a man who made mistakes, who was perhaps ignorant, who was often thoughtless, and who was too easily satisfied that the Devil whispered every objection that rose from the depths to the surface of his consciousness; further, I believe that he accustomed himself to employ in the service of righteousness methods for which his taste, if definitely challenged in later years, would have expressed no approval, and of which his intellect, patiently summoned to give judgment, would have offered a settled condemnation; but I am convinced that from the very first to the very last the man's soul was wholesome and true, that he acted from an absolute purity of motive, that he was as selfless as any man in modern conditions of life can ever hope to be in seeking the welfare and the salvation of his fellow-creatures.

Revivalism can be presented to the judgment of men in such a manner as to inspire only disgust and horror. Even