ed.
And his suffering arose from the tremendous power of his imagination. At
a Meeting he would tell amusing stories, and in the company of several
people he would talk with a gaiety that deceived; but with one or two,
deeply interested to know why he was a Salvationist, and what he really
thought about life, he would open his heart, and show one at least
something of its agony. He was afflicted by the sins of the whole world.
They hurt him, tore him, wounded him, and broke his heart. He did not
merely know that people suffer from starvation; that children run to
hide under a bed at the first sound of a drunken parent's step on the
stair; that thousands of women are friendless and defaced on the
streets; that thousands of boys go to their bodily and spiritual ruin
only for want of a little natural parental care; that men and women are
locked up like wild beasts in prison who would be good parents and
law-abiding citizens were love allowed to enter and plead with them--he
did not merely know these things, but he visualised and felt in his own
person the actual tortures of all these perishing creatures. He wept for
them. He prayed for them. Sometimes he would not sleep for thinking of
them.

"I have seen him with suffering face and extended arms walk up and down
his room, crying out from the depths of his heart: 'Oh, those poor
people, those poor people!--the sad, wretched women, the little,
trembling frightened children meant to be so happy!--all cursed with
sin, cursed and crushed and tortured by sin!' And he would then open his
arms as if to embrace the whole world, and exclaim, 'Why won't they let
us save them?'--meaning, 'Why won't society and the State let The
Salvation Army save them?'

"His attitude towards suffering and sorrow was, nevertheless, harder in
many ways than that of certain humanitarians. He believed in a Devil, he
believed in Hell, and he believed in the saying that there are those who
would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead. And so he held it
the wisdom of statesmanship that when all men have been given a fair
opportunity for repentance, and after love has done everything in its
power to save and convert the lawless and bad, those who will not accept
Salvation should be punished with all the force of a civilisation that
must needs defend itself. The word punishment was very often on his
lips. I think that he believed in the value of punishment almost as
profoundly as he believed in th