but
men still say--so anxious are they to escape from the miracle, so
determined to account for every great thing by little reasons--that his
success as revivalist lay only in his powers as an organiser. Now,
nothing is further from the truth. General Booth was not a great
organiser, not even a great showman. He would have ruined any business
entrusted to his management. He would long ago have ruined the
organisation of The Salvation Army if his life had been spent on that
side of its operations. Far from being the hard, shrewd, calculating,
and statesmanlike genius of The Army's machinery, General Booth has
always been its heart and soul, its dreamer and its inspiration. The
brains of The Army are to be looked for elsewhere. Bramwell Booth is the
man of affairs. Bramwell Booth is the master-mind directing all those
world-wide activities. And but for Bramwell Booth The Salvation Army as
it now exists, a vast catholic Organisation, would be unknown to
mankind.

"General Booth's secret, so far as one may speak about it at all, lay in
his perfectly beautiful and most passionate sympathy with suffering and
pain. I have met only one other man in my life who so powerfully
realised the sorrows of other people. Because General Booth realised
these sorrows so very truly and so very actually, he was able to
communicate his burning desire for radical reformation to other people.
The contagiousness of his enthusiasm was the obvious cause of his
extraordinary success, but the hidden cause of this enthusiasm was the
living, breathing, heart-beating reality of his sympathy with sorrow.
When he spoke to one of the sufferings endured by the children of a
drunkard, for instance, it was manifest that he himself felt the very
tortures and agonies of those unhappy children--really felt them, really
endured them. His face showed it. There was no break in the voice, no
pious exclamation, no gesture in the least theatrical or sentimental.
One saw in the man's face that he was enduring pain, that the thought
was so real to him that he himself actually suffered, and suffered
acutely. If we had imagination enough to feel as he felt the dreadful
fears and awful deprivation of little children in the godless slums of
great cities, we, too, should rush out from our comfortable ease to
raise Salvation Armies. It would be torture to sit still. It would be
impossible to do nothing.

"This wonderful old man suffered all his life as few have ever suffer