ution. 'We don't make half
enough of sin!' cries The General. Politicians and men of science
seem like scene-shifters in the drama of life, and religion stands
out clear and distinct as the only actor.

"'People have taken to The Salvation Army because it's so kind to
poor people,' General Booth tells me; 'they know I love the poor,
they know I weep bitterly for all the hunger and nakedness and
sorrow in the world. People know I'm sincere. That's it! They know
The Salvation Army is sincere, that it's doing kind actions, and
helping those whom nobody else will help or can help. That's what
makes us popular. Sympathy.'

"But the secret of The General is not humaneness. His secret is the
reality with which he invests sin. Hear him talk about sin, and you
realise the man's spell.

"At one moment he is full of humour and robust talk, a genial,
merry, shrewd-eyed old gentleman; at the next--at the mention of
real sin--his brows contract, his eyes flash, and his tongue hisses
out such hatred and contempt and detestation as no sybarite could
find on the tip of his tongue for anything superlatively coarse or
ill-flavoured.

"'Sin!' he cries to me. 'Sin is a real thing--a damnable thing! I
don't care what science calls it, or what some of the pulpits are
calling it. I know what it is. Sin is devilish. It is sin and only
sin which is stopping progress. It is sin and only sin which
prevents the world from being happy. Sin! Go into the slums of the
great cities--pick up little girls of six years of age sold into
infamy by their parents; look at the drunken mother murdering her
child, the father strapping his cripple son--sin!--that's what I
call sin; something beastly and filthy and devilish and
nasty--nasty, dreadfully nasty.'

"As you listen and as you realise that The Salvation Army contains
numberless men changed in the twinkling of an eye from lives of
such sin as this to lives of beneficent activity, you begin to feel
that General Booth, right or wrong, has at least hit upon one of
the most effective ways for helping evolution.

"He makes sin as real to the individual as only the mystics can
imagine for themselves. Perhaps humanity likes to be told how black
it is, how far it is from the perfectness after which Nature is
blundering a