to be found in the
explanation of this unifying power. In spite of intellectual
shortcomings which might seem almost to exclude him from the serious
attention of educated people, he stands out with a marked emphasis from
the company of far abler men by reason of this power--this sense of
unusual vigour and abnormal concentration of strength. And the
explanation of this power, which unifies an otherwise incoherent
personality, is to be found, I am quite confident, in his burning hatred
of iniquity.

As a boy, like the poet Gray and the late Lord Salisbury, he suffered a
good deal of bullying, and thus learned at school something beyond the
reach of the Latin Grammar, namely, the brutality of human nature. He
has never forgotten that discovery. Indeed, his after-life has widened
and intensified that early lesson. Sin is brutality. It is selfishness
seeking its low pleasure and its base delight in vilest self-indulgence
involving the suffering of others, sometimes their profoundest
degradation, even their absolute destruction. Particularly did he
experience this burning conviction when he came to understand the
well-nigh inconceivable brutality of sexual vice. I believe that it was
a poor harlot in the slums of London who first opened for him the door
of fanaticism.

He had longed as a schoolboy to hit back at his tyrants, and now in the
dawn of manhood that long repression made its weight felt in the blows
he showered on the face of evil. For a year or two he was a wild man of
evangelicalism, leading attacks on evil, challenging public attention,
seeking imprisonment, courting martyrdom. It was from the flaming
indignation of his soul that Mr. Stead took fire, and led a crusade
against impurity which shocked the conscience of the eighties. But so
deep and eternal was this hatred of evil, that General Booth soon came
to see that he must express it in some manner which would outlive the
heady moments of a "lightning campaign." He settled down to express that
profound abhorrence of iniquity in terms of organisation. Tares might be
torn suddenly from the human heart, but not the root of evil. If he
could not kill the devil, at least he could circumvent him.

Such intense hatred of evil as still consumes his being is not popular
in these days, and may perhaps be regarded as irrational. But we should
do well to remind ourselves that while those who regard evil merely as a
vestigial memory of human evolution do little or not