The Authoritative Life of General William Booth | Page 6

Especially was

this the effect on young people. Anything like interest, or pleasure, in
those dull and dreary, not to say "vain" repetitions on their part must
indeed have been rare.
It is not surprising then that William Booth saw nothing to attract him
in the Church of his fathers. John Wesley, that giant reformer of
religion in England, had been dead some forty years, and his life-work
had not been allowed to affect "the Church" very profoundly. His
followers having seceded from it contrary to his orders and entreaties,
had already made several sects, and in the chief of these William Booth
presently found for himself at least a temporary home. Here the
services were, to some extent, independent of books; earnest preaching
of the truth was often heard from the pulpits, and some degree of real
concern for the spiritual advancement of the people was manifested by
the preachers.
Under this preaching and these influences, and the singing of Wesley's
hymns, the lad was deeply moved. To his last days he sang some of
those grand old songs as much as, if not more than, any others; that one,
for example, containing the verse:--
And can I yet delay my little all to give? To tear my soul from earth
away, for Jesus to receive? Nay, but I yield, I yield! I can hold out no
more, I sink, by dying love compelled, and own Thee conqueror.
The mind that has never yet come in contact with teaching of this
character can scarcely comprehend the effect of such thoughts on a
young and ardent soul. This Jesus, who gave up Heaven and all that
was bright and pleasant to devote Himself to the world's Salvation, was
presented to him as coming to ask the surrender of his heart and life to
His service, and his heart could not long resist the appeal. It was in no
large congregation, however, but in one of the smaller Meetings that
William Booth made the glorious sacrifice of himself which he had
been made to understand was indispensable to real religion. Speaking
some time ago, he thus described that great change:--
"When as a giddy youth of fifteen I was led to attend Wesley Chapel,
Nottingham, I cannot recollect that any individual pressed me in the
direction of personal surrender to God. I was wrought upon quite
independently of human effort by the Holy Ghost, who created within
me a great thirst for a new life.
"I felt that I wanted, in place of the life of self-indulgence, to which I

was yielding myself, a happy, conscious sense that I was pleasing God,
living right, and spending all my powers to get others into such a life. I
saw that all this ought to be, and I decided that it should be. It is
wonderful that I should have reached this decision in view of all the
influences then around me. My professedly Christian master never
uttered a word to indicate that he believed in anything he could not see,
and many of my companions were worldly and sensual, some of them
even vicious.
"Yet I had that instinctive belief in God which, in common with my
fellow-creatures, I had brought into the world with me. I had no
disposition to deny my instincts, which told me that if there was a God
His laws ought to have my obedience and His interests my service.
"I felt that it was better to live right than to live wrong, and as to caring
for the interests of others instead of my own, the condition of the
suffering people around me, people with whom I had been so long
familiar, and whose agony seemed to reach its climax about this time,
undoubtedly affected me very deeply.
"There were children crying for bread to parents whose own distress
was little less terrible to witness.
"One feeling specially forced itself upon me, and I can recollect it as
distinctly as though it had transpired only yesterday, and that was the
sense of the folly of spending my life in doing things for which I knew
I must either repent or be punished in the days to come.
"In my anxiety to get into the right way, I joined the Methodist Church,
and attended the Class Meetings, to sing and pray and speak with the
rest." (A Class Meeting was the weekly muster of all members of the
church, who were expected to tell their leader something of their soul's
condition in answer to his inquiries.) "But all the time the inward Light
revealed to me that I must not only renounce everything I knew to be
sinful, but make restitution, so far as I had the ability, for any wrong I
had done to others before I could