ld only be done in fine weather,
and the theory is still existent in many quarters. As if the comfort and
convenience of "the workers," and not the danger and misery of the
people, were to fix the times of such effort!

"But the people will not come," is even now pleaded as an excuse for the
omission or abandonment of any imaginable attempt to do good. As if the
people's general disinclination for anything that has to do with God
were not the precise reason for His wish to "send out" His servants!

"Such a plan would never succeed here," is an almost invariable excuse
made for not undertaking anything new. The General was never blind to
differences between this and that locality and population. But he
insisted that no plan that could be devised by those on any given spot,
and especially no plan that has manifestly been blessed and used by God
elsewhere should be dismissed without proper, earnest trial.

"But that has never been done, or has never done well here," seemed to
him rather a reason for trying it with, perhaps, some little
modification than for leaving a plan untried. The inexorable law to
which he insisted that everything should bend was that nothing can
excuse inactivity and want of enterprise where souls are perishing. And
he was spared to see even Governments beginning to recognise that it is
inexcusable to let sin triumph in "a Christian country." He proved that
it was possible to raise up "Christian Soldiers," who would not only
sing, or hear singing, in beautiful melody about "Marching, onward as to
War"; but who would really do it, even when, it led to real battle.

Chapter VII

East London Beginning

What were Mr. and Mrs. Booth to do? They were excluded from most of the
Churches in which during the last twenty years they had led so many
souls to Christ. They found themselves out of harmony with most of the
undenominational evangelists of the day, and, moreover, they had
experienced throughout even the brightest of their past years a gnawing
dissatisfaction with much of their work, which The General thus
described in the preface to his book, _In Darkest England, and the Way
Out_:--

"All the way through my career I have keenly felt the remedial
measures usually enumerated in Christian programmes, and ordinarily
employed by Christian philanthropy, to be lamentably inadequate for
any effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of the outcast
classes. The res