viously a tribal idol than Dagon or Chemosh.

Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the Army. Like
Frederick's grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever (the
most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and though it is evident to
anyone who has ever heard General Booth and his best officers that they
would work as hard for human salvation as they do at present if they
believed that death would be the end of them individually, they and
their followers have a bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists
were heroically enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment
which will bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a
better life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent by
themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any active
person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the Salvationists
are unusually happy people. And is it not the very diagnostic of true
salvation that it shall overcome the fear of death? Now the man who has
come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change so
called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and utterly
careless life, has not overcome the fear of death at all: on the
contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on
any terms whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really saved until he
is ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap, having paid scot and
lot and something over, and let his eternal life pass on to renew its
youth in the battalions of the future.

Then there is the nasty lying habit called confession, which the Army
encourages because it lends itself to dramatic oratory, with plenty of
thrilling incident. For my part, when I hear a convert relating the
violences and oaths and blasphemies he was guilty of before he was
saved, making out that he was a very terrible fellow then and is the
most contrite and chastened of Christians now, I believe him no more
than I believe the millionaire who says he came up to London or Chicago
as a boy with only three halfpence in his pocket. Salvationists have
said to me that Barbara in my play would never have been taken in by so
transparent a humbug as Snobby Price; and certainly I do not think
Snobby could have taken in any experienced Salvationist on a point on
which the Salvationist did not wish to be taken in. But on the point of
conversion all Salvationists wish to be taken in; for the more obvious
the sinner