Part 5
And it was this man here, I think, is the romance of religion as a force in the strange lives of a shabby London quarter who, coming happy from his home for a meeting in the Salvation Army hall by a chance word to the Puncher, fresh from prison, turned that remarkable man from murder to a life of devotion and service.
What other force can society devise which will take such a man as this Plumber, bred in drunkenness and crime, and convert him from a thief, a dipsomaniac, and a domestic tyrant, into an upright, honourable, and pure-minded citizen? Conversion is quite properly a subject for psychological examination, but modern theology misses its chief weapon against the attacks of materialism when it fails to insist upon the immense significance of these spiritual miracles. Whatever conversion may be, whatever its physical machinery, it is religion and only religion which can put the machinery in motion, and make a bad man a good man, a profitless and dangerous citizen a useful member of society. Surely this story of the Plumber, even as it is narrated here in a few pages of print, must bring home to the minds of politicians and sociologists really acquainted with the appalling condition of modern London, that here in religion is the one great hope of regeneration, the one certain guarantee, as the whole of Tolstoy's work teaches, of a noble posterity. There is really nothing else.
RAGS AND BONES
IN some ways the man in this story is the most original and striking of the group with whom I discussed religious experience in poor London. Certainly the manner of his conversion is quite different from the usual narratives recorded in books. I can find nothing like it in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Let me begin by attempting to paint his portrait. He is very like the popular idea of a burglar; his nose is brief, and flat to the face, somewhat broken; he has a long upper lip; his mouth is twisted into a snarl; his light-coloured, bird-like eyes glare fiercely at you under a heavy and overhanging forehead; the colour of the old face, which is ploughed with deep wrinkles and marked by bitter suffering, is like dirty linen that peculiar prison-tinge, half grey, half brown, which suggests stubborn powers of resistance and the habit of silent thought. He is vigorous and powerful, with jerky movements and passionate gestures. His voice has the fog of London in its growl. When he laughs his eyes remain hard, and his mouth is like a cat's when it draws back its lips. He is impatient of subtle questions, strikes the table often with a clenched fist, occasionally yields to a kind of ecstasy in the midst of eating bread and butter throwing back his head and shouting 'Glory to God!' in the direction of the ceiling, his face wrinkled up and contorted as though he was suffering physical torture.
He has suffered; he tells you that he knows. He is rugged, irregular, real.
One does not quite know what to make of this rough old son of the slums, except to say that he has suffered frightfully, that he has been delivered from hopeless despair in a miraculous manner, and that he is now as firmly fixed in righteousness as any saint of mysticism. As to the mystery of his consciousness, as to his ideas of God and the nature of existence waiting humanity beyond the grave, one can conjecture nothing.
He began life in misery. He was the child of parents who spent all their money in drink. His infancy was spent in his mother's arms in the 'Queen's Arms ' or the 'Royal Arms,' a double embrace which afforded his young soul little acquaintance either with maternal affection or royal favour. His early childhood was also spent chiefly in publichouses, where he stood at his mother's knee half suffocated in a dark and moving world of trousers, petticoats, and spilt liquor. By the time he was tall enough to see the counter he was old enough to fend for himself in the streets; he preferred them to the tavern. He had long been used to going home with his mother after midnight, and now he very often waited for her outside the public-house door until he was so tired that he crawled away to sleep in a yard or a doorway. The streets had no terrors for him.
This life of neglect, misery, and destitution, by some miracle, did not depress Teddy. He grew up, in spite of it, sharp, active, acute, and humorous. He was sharp enough to provide himself with food, to avoid thrashings from his father, and to find comfortable dosses in back yards. Later, he was acute enough to see that the ranks of an infantry regiment was the best place for a hungry, growing boy. He enlisted and soldiered without distinction, but without great crime, till his time was up. Throughout his soldiering he was a cockney humorist.
Drink was getting hold of him; but he was strong, and could carry a skinful. He came out of the Army a hard drinker, but not a drunkard. He had his wits about him. He became a marine-store dealer, that is to say, a rag-and-bone merchant in a very small way of business. His liveliness, his fondness for drink, and his endless stories of sharp practice and cunning, made him popular and brought him business. But as fast as money came in not very fast, perhaps he drank it away. Then he married a good woman, and his wife exercised a certain restraint over him. Things began to go better. He was really deeply attached to his wife, and for her sake he made a manful fight to keep out of the public-houses; there were whole weeks when he did not drink a glass of beer or waste a penny in the taverns. His home was really a very happy one, as happiness goes in shabby London.
But terrible disaster overtook him. His wife died. He was left quite alone in the world. It was the death of his wife which made him an habitual drunkard. Before that he had no overmastering craving. Strong-willed and tenacious, he had power over his appetite, could control it, and make it obedient. But the death of his wife broke him down, and drove him to alcohol for consolation. One must try to understand alcohol's fatal attraction for the poor.
'The sway of alcohol over mankind,' says Professor James, 'is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading and poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
'Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation. Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever
since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.'
This is so true that one surely need not emphasize it; but, unfortunately, too many who strive to cure people of alcoholism will not recognize that they are endeavouring to take away a man's escape from misery, his one means of flight into the rapturous air of illusion; they persist in treating drunkenness as a form of greediness quite similar to a schoolboy's stomach-ache from overbunning; in this way they fail in their good intentions.
The psychological aspect of alcoholism is one that opens the door to much mystery, and reveals to those who look long enough and deep enough puzzling glimpses of the human soul.
This rough man, an ex-soldier and now a rag-and-bone merchant, finding himself bowed down by the death of a woman he had loved sincerely and nobly, went to drink for oblivion, stood in a public-house to forget the grave, laughed with the drinkers to forget his desolate home, drank and drank to stop the bleeding of his heart. And he discovered happiness. The filmy screens surrounding his normal consciousness lifted with the potent fumes, and he inhabited fields of consciousness wide, glorious, and delightful. It is important to know that he became a happy drunkard. Some men find in alcohol a deadening and soporific narcotic; they grow sullen, silent, quarrelsome in a grumbling, growling way; others, and of this company was our poor widower, discover in alcohol a Jinni, or, if you like, an Ifrit, who lifts them up to the seventh heaven, transports them over stellar space, builds for them in the twinkling of an eye palaces of
porphyry and jasper, fills their hands with gold, and breathes into their souls the sense and the conviction of absolute power. From deep melancholy this man rose to dazzling heights of happiness. Alcohol, like the magic carpet, lifted him into mid-air; like the ivory-tube, revealed to him all he desired to see; like the enchanted apple, healed him of all sickness.
Because he was so intensely happy, he became immensely popular. The wretched Miserables who congregated in his public-houses for happiness and oblivion, welcomed his company, laughed at his jests, applauded his songs, loved him in their drunken sodden joy for the wonderful contagion of his joviality.
For a long time, for years, this state of things continued.
Then his business dwindled and failed. He was in trouble for his rent. Sharper men served his customers. He went laughing and singing to his ruin, caring not a jot what became of him. So long as he had the magic of alcohol, what mattered rags and bones?
He took to sleeping in yards, in dustbins, in any dog-hole or cellar that he could stumble into unobserved by midnight police. He got his living that is to say, money for drink by a hundred clever dodges. Although this man has a face which reminds one of Flaxman's fiends, throughout his life he has been inoffensive, always he has enjoyed popularity.
'No one can help liking old Teddy' is a phrase in the district. The man is reckoned clever. He would take the laces out of his boots, go into public-houses where he was not known, and offer them for sale. He made money in this fashion, and could sleep with the laces in his pocket, ready for the next day's traffic. His eyes were keen to notice vendible things in backyards and in gutters. He cadged his way through life, without committing crimes. In a moment of destitution he got hold of a sheet of newspaper, tore it into strips, and sold them at a penny each as bringers of luck. ' He was too good-tempered to be a criminal.
But he found it harder and ever harder to pick up sufficient money to satisfy his increasing craving for drink. He sank deeper into the gutter, his joviality began to leave him, his old companions showed less disposition to pay for his drink, less disposition to listen to his jests. For one thing, his clothes were now the foul rags of a tramp. Alcohol is an Ifrit that has the habit of leaving its victims at an awkward moment. The magic worlds fade away. The palaces dissolve and melt. Consciousness narrows to a pint pot.
Once at this point in his career he had what is called 'a turn.' After having slept in various areas and certain conveniences attached to public-houses for a long period, he discovered an old muddy, brokendown cart in a yard, which was never disturbed by its owner, and which offered shelter from wind and rain. Here he established himself, and this old cart became his home. People got to know about it. They laughed at Teddy's 'doss.' He slunk into the yard at one or two in the morning, climbed into the cart, lay in his rags on the floor, and slept soundly till the dawn.
Well, one cold night alter a fairly successful day, he found himself with coppers enough for a 'fourpenny kip,' that is to say, a bed in a common lodging-house. Every now and then he indulged himself in this luxury, especially on occasions when whisky had excited his feelings, and his soul became princely On this particular night he walked proudly towards his lodging-house, thinking of the kitchen fire in the basement, and anticipating joy from a dirty sheet, a foul blanket, and a palliasse such as you would not give to your dog.
On his way he met an old tramp, a poor broken wretch known in the neighbourhood as Old Bumps. This man whined about the bitter cold, said he felt bad, wished to God he had some place where he could sleep. Teddy told him of the cart, and gave him permission to use it for that night only.
After glorious repose in the lodging-house, Teddy rose and came out into the world with renewed hope. As he walked someone met him, started, turned quite grey, and stood. 'What's the matter?' asked
Teddy. 'Why!' cried the man, with an oath, 'you're dead!' ' Dead! what do you mean?' 'D'you mean to tell me you're alive?' Teddy demanded explanations. 'Everybody in the place is saying you're dead,' replied the man; 'hundreds say they have seen your corpse. You died last night in the cart. I saw them wheeling your body away.'
Old Bumps had died in his sleep. Someone had seen the body lying there. A policeman had been told. The crowd saw a corpse taken out of the cart and wheeled away in an ambulance to the mortuary. The whole world said, 'Teddy is dead.'
The thought that he had been considered dead had an explosive effect in Teddy's mind. It was a catherine-wheel of alarm, scattering sparks and confusion. It pulled him up. It made him reflect on death. He considered within himself that the hour surely cometh, and for him might come suddenly and soon, when a man's soul passes out of the body, and must give account of the deeds done in the body. He saw how very easily the corpse of Old Bumps might have been his corpse. He might die one night in his sleep. He might be taken out of that cart, cold, stiff, motionless. People would say, ' Teddy is dead dead like a dog!' But what of his soul?
"Love would not be love," says Bourget, "unless it could carry one to crime." And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to crime.
On this Professor James comments, 'In other words, great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions set by "conscience." And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a "higher affection." If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgement to be near at hand, how quickly do we put
our moral house in order we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.'
The most available emotion fear began to work in the mind of this London Miserable. He thought, What can I do? It seemed to him that he must first of all escape from the present life. He could never more sleep in that cart. He must avoid his old haunts. Best of all, he must leave London behind him. Somewhere he must find work. Somehow he must begin again.
So the frightened drunkard, born and bred in the gutters of the slums, took to the road in middle age, and tramped out of London to save his soul.
I have never seen man's face express more suffering than the battered, weather-beaten face of this rag-and-bone merchant when he described to me the horrors of a tramp's life. To tramp till the legs are like boards, the feet like burning coals, the empty stomach ravenous and tigerish for food, and everywhere to find the doors of homes shut against one, to receive only fierce or mocking looks from men, frightened or contemptuous glances from women and children; to walk on and on under a burning sky, through a downpour of rushing rain, in snow and hail, in drenching mist and blood-congealing cold always regarded with suspicion, barked at by the dogs in farmyards and stables, followed threateningly by the village policeman, refused not only one helpful word or one kindly gift, but refused work of any kind, the hardest and most menial this is an experience which hardens a man's heart, turns the blood to vinegar, and makes him the savage enemy of his own kind.
Nor was it much better when he reached the shelter of a workhouse. No effort was made to save his soul, to humanize his heart with kindness. No one ever sought to reclaim him, to provide him with manly work, to hold out the hope of wages, home, and self-respect. From the moment when the door of the workhouse opened he was
treated as a criminal. Hard words and hard looks accompanied him to his bed, and before he could eat a workhouse breakfast he had to break this broken tramp, starving for nourishment half a ton of stones. Many a time on the road he felt deserted by man and God, and driven by some inexorable devil onwards to greater suffering and more terrible hell. Again and again he abandoned hope, lived in blackest despair, and only refrained from self-destruction out of fear of hell. And all the time he was tortured by a craving for alcohol, which was like a fire burning at his vitals.
He told me a curious story. He had tramped one day across Salisbury Plain, and on the point of collapse from starvation, he sank down in a ditch, and covering his face with his hands, weeping like a child, he cried aloud, 'O God, give me something to eat!' A feeling of help came to him in the midst of his exhaustion and despair. He took his hands from his face and looked to right and left of him; not a soul was to be seen. His eyes looked ahead of him. In the opposite hedge he saw a piece of paper. He got up, convinced that there was the help he sought. The paper turned out to be a bag. It contained two scones.
A curious coincidence.
He tramped back to London, feeling that those who knew him would be more likely to help him than peasants and farmers who took him for a criminal. He arrived in his old slum such a pitiable object 'lousy as a cuckoo,' in the local phrase that everybody turned their backs upon him. Here and there he managed to cadge a drink. Now and again he picked something up in the gutters which he was able to sell for beer. Occasionally he got a copper for holding a horse. Once or twice he held the spirited cob of the Puncher, while that flash prizefighter was drinking in saloon bars. In this manner he existed for months and months, always starving, frequently half drunk, and getting every day more dreadful a creature to look at, so that even many in like case with himself gave him a wide berth.
One day, when he was quite penniless, the craving for alcohol became so forceful and irresistible that he knew, whatever the cost, he must
obtain it. At that moment he was on the edge of crime. Like a ravenous beast he went slouching at a half-run through the streets, looking with his ferocious eyes for some chance of getting money and drink. As luck would have it, he saw the landlord of a public-house in which he had spent hundreds of pounds talking to a man at the door. Teddy, in his vile rags, went up to him, and said, 'Will you trust me with a pot till to-morrow?'
The landlord looked at him with contempt, and answered, 'Don't you see I'm talking to a gentleman?' But Teddy's craving was proof against insult and contempt. ' Trust me till to-morrow,' he said. 'I'm perishing for a drink.' The landlord made no answer. Again Teddy made his request. This time he was told to go to hell. 'Come on,' pleaded the poor wretch, 'give us one chance; just a drink, only one; I'll go away quiet, if you will.' 'Oh, go and mess the Army about!' said the publican, with impatient contempt. There was a Salvation Army open-air meeting in the next street, and the sound of the band came to their ears. 'Do you mean it? you won't?' demanded Teddy. 'Yes. You go and mess the Army about,' repeated the publican. Now it must be told, what perhaps is not widely known, that in these destitute quarters of London, the publicans very often support the Salvation Army with subscriptions, and frequently encourage them to get hold of the worst drunkards. A Salvationist can always go freely into the public bar of these gin-pal-aces. As one of them explained to me, 'A publican doesn't make anything out of a four-ale man, and when they get badly and habitually drunk, he's never over pleased to see them, for often it means a row in the bar and trouble with the police. What the publican likes is the toff, who cracks down a bob for three or four penn'orth of whisky and a tuppeny smoke. There's profit there. And the toff drinks, lights his cigar, and goes making room for others. But the four-ale man spends his twopence, and sits solid for hours, hoping to cadge another drink from some mate who never appears. Yes, the publicans support us. It pays them.'
So it will be seen that this particular publican really meant it when he told Teddy to go and mess the Army about. He had no desire, perhaps, for the salvation of Teddy's soul, but he did not want him for a customer, which from the publican's point of view comes to the same thing.
The contempt in the words stung Teddy. He considered how much wealth he had poured into that public-house. And now, when he was mad for just one drink, just because he was penniless and in rags, the devil he had enriched ordered him, like a dog, to get out of his way. The words 'go and mess the Army about ' stuck in his mind. Suddenly it occurred to him that this thing called the Salvation Army was kind even to tramps in a condition as vile as his. It was like light to his soul. Denied by the publican, this sinner thought of Christ. There on the slum pavement, outside a tavern, mad for drink, and sunken to the very depths of misery, all of a sudden the consciousness of the outcast received the idea of Christ's kindness to the lost.
As I said at the beginning of the story, I know nothing like it in the chronicles of conversion. How different from the ecstatic vision of the mystic, how different from the glowing light suddenly suffusing the prayerful soul of the penitent, how different from the mysterious voice calling a dejected spirit to the love of God! And yet how natural, how real, how simple, in its abnormality. Also, how true to the slums!
'Right, guv'nor,' said Teddy, and he said it savagely, not at all in the tone of penitence, 'I'll take your tip!' and he walked away in his filth and his rags.
He went straight to the open-air meeting in the next street. The band was getting ready for the march back to the hall. Teddy approached the drummer and said, 'Can I come along with you?' The drummer looked at him and said, 'Yes.' Teddy marched beside that man to the hall, the rattle of the drum and the blare of the trumpets making strange music in his soul. At the meeting in the hall he broke down, covered with remorse for his past life, and feeling how greatly he had rejected the mercy of God. He went to the penitent form, knelt down,
and prayed with anguish for forgiveness, and also for strength to make a fresh start. 'Oh, God, oh, God,' he kept crying, 'I want to be born again!'
He says the answer came with the cry. Then and there he felt his breast broadened, his soul lightened, and the blood coursing joyfully through his veins. He was saved.
Remember that ten minutes before this man had been running through the streets, mad for alcohol.
The Salvationists showed him love and kindness. He was in a terrible state, one of the dirtiest men ever handled by that corps. He had no socks and no shirt. Next to the blackened flesh of his feet was the broken leather of his foul boots; next to the skin and bones of his legs, trousers that were rent and threadbare and unspeakable; next to the poor body, something that called itself a coat and was not. This man had neither socks, nor shirt, nor waistcoat; the state of his skin must not be described; they had to get an old sack to put over him. It was the case of his trade rags and bones.
To such a condition can a man come in our modern days. To such a condition can drink bring him; to such a condition the State allows him to come. Religion took this man and saved him from the publican and the State.
Here, you may be tempted to think, is the case of a man merely saved by being provided with work; a man who made use of religion to obtain employment, and lived his repentance more or less comfortably on the wages of charity.
Hear the end.
He left the hall, after his conversion, and without saying a word to any of his friends, walked about the streets for two nights. As a rule the Army carefully looks after its penitents, but in Teddy's case there was an accident. Everybody thought that somebody else was nursing him;
in fact, no one did. They set him on a white horse next day, and led him in triumph through his old haunts, through the foulest quarters of the town, exhibiting Teddy as a converted sinner, and making a vast impression. But this Man on the White Horse was starving, and he said nothing. He never complained, he never hinted for bread or penny. He endured the agony of starvation in a noble silence. All that time he was praying a single prayer, 'Oh, God! give me one chance, and I'll serve You all the days of my life.' He was determined not to live by the Salvation Army like almost all the men I talked to, he glories in the sneering title of 'Starvation Army ' he was determined to provide for himself. 'I didn't go to the Army for beer, nor yet for charity, nor yet for work,' he cries fiercely; 'that's what a good many do go for, and they go away disappointed, calling it Starvation Army. Glory to that title! The Army isn't for moochers and work-shys, and willing-to-work-but-won'ts. No; it's for those who seek Almighty God, who go on their knees to Him, and who get up with something inside them that won't ever let them cadge or whine or play the loafer again. And that's what I got. Praise God! He lifted me up from a cadging, drunken beast, and gave me a soul to praise Him and love Him and stand firm. Do you know how I made my start? I'll tell you. It began like this. Somebody gave me twopence. It was my first capital. I bought for that sum a couple of little flour bags. I picked them to pieces, sewed them up again as aprons, and sold them for twopence each. That was my start turning twopence into fourpence. With that fourpence I bought more flour bags. With every penny I made I bought something else, and sold again, till my capital was half a crown all made in one long day. I was now a man of business. I worked like this for weeks, till I was fairly floated; then I slept in a Rowton House like a gentleman; I started a rag-and-bone round, kept myself steady, saved money, took a house, and began to do well. Never a farthing did I take from the Army.'
And now for a confession. Some months after this amazing regeneration the news came, 'Teddy's broke it!' which meant Teddy had gone back to drink. This rumour reached the ears of the 'angeladjutant'; it was Teddy, by the way, who gave her that name. The adjutant was returning home after an
exhaustive day's work, and she had a meeting in the evening. But the news was serious. 'Teddy's broke it!' it meant ruin for poor Teddy's soul. The Man had fallen from the White Horse. She jumped upon her bicycle, went to her officers, and in a few minutes the whole corps was beating the district for this fallen star, this lost sheep, this poor dog returned to its vomit. To this day the corps sometimes speaks of the great bicycle hunt for Teddy.
They found him at last in a public-house, mad drunk. They got him back to his nice home, which they found wrecked and broken and defiled, and put him to bed.
When he came to himself he found that someone had lit a fire and had set a kettle to boil for tea, and was kneeling in the little chamber praying and crying. It was the adjutant. The loving gentleness broke his heart.
How did he fall? He himself says now that he is all the better for that fall, that before it he was 'too selfconfident,' not meek enough to know his own weakness, and not sensible enough to realize that only God can save a drunkard. But there was a very human disposing cause.
Consider this little narrative of a fragment of London's social world: Teddy had a mother who was in the workhouse, well cared for and protected from drink by wholesome regulations. Every Sunday after his conversion he went to the workhouse, brought his mother home, gave her a shilling and a good tea, and afterwards took her safely back. But this filial affection was not good enough for the neighbours. Tongues wagged. 'Everybody knew what he should have done!' says one of his friends contemptuously. Well, these gossiping neighbours used to talk to Teddy's mother, get her alone and tell her she ought to make him remove her from the workhouse and let her live like a lady. They worked upon her feelings, till she grew to hate her son, till she felt that it was he who put her in the House and kept her there. Then one Sunday, during his absence at the Salvation Army meeting, having filled the old woman with drink,
the neighbours assisted her to smash up the home he had got together with such great labour, self-denial, and pardonable pride; they smashed up his home to teach him filial affection.
The blow was too much for Teddy. He went out from the ruin of his house savage and disheartened, and broke it.
The tender-heartedness of the adjutant brought him once more to the penitent form and to Christ, where this rough, big, powerful, burglarlooking man sobbed and cried like a child. And something of great importance came of this fall. While he was mad drunk in the publichouse a Salvation lass had entered and commanded the publican not to serve him with any more drink. Teddy was struck by that woman, and considered her. He had prayed for a wife for his home, and now that it was ruined he felt that only a wife could help him to restore it. He made sure of the power of this second conversion, and then offered himself to the Salvationist.
She liked him even in his drunkenness, as we have said, everybody liked Teddy and when he told her all the ache and longing of his heart, she got after a time to love him. With her love to assist him he prospered more and more at his business, and now, with a child in his home, the delight of his eyes, he has one of the best rag-and-bone rounds in aristocratic London, and his happy home, his prosperous domesticity set an example to his neighbours. One day he came to the adjutant and subscribed ten shillings to the funds of the local corps. She did not like to take it, but he insisted. 'They tell me,' he said, 'you are worried for the gas-bill.' Then he said, 'How much is it, and how much have you got?' 'With your ten shillings, Teddy,' she answered, ' I have got a pound, and the bill is for fifty shillings.' 'Thirty bob short,' he said. 'How long have you got?' ' Till to-morrow morning.'
At eight o'clock next morning Teddy came with the thirty shillings.
What a revolution in personality! Does one exaggerate to call it a new birth?
APPARENT FAILURE
THIS is a strange love story. It has the interest of presenting to the reader a poor man's version of the marriage problem, a theme usually restricted by fashionable novelists to the lucky classes. Also, it has the particular interest of showing religion disappointed of a soul and yet undefeated in its tremendous conflict with evil.
When I was gathering the materials for this book, and returning every now and then for fresh air from the slums to happier places in society, I found that almost everybody to whom I spoke of my investigations said in the modern tired way, 'But do these conversions last? Are they not merely disturbances of the emotions, and quite transitory in their effects?'
The reader who has followed these stories with intelligence and with knowledge of human nature deeper than that which serves the average poor man-of-the-world in his journeys round the sun, will understand how I must have felt, listening to such chilling commentaries on stories like the Puncher's, the Criminal's, and the Lowest of the Low. It was not until I heard the story which now follows, the story which I have purposely reserved for the end of my book, and which I name 'Apparent Failure' with a good reason, that I learned how best to silence the lounging critics of conversion those innumerable people too shallow, I fear, to study such a work as Professor James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and certainly too superficial ever to experience in themselves profound spiritual changes or, indeed, any emotion of a penetrating nature.
The answer to these people is the Seventy-Times-Seven of forgiveness. Even if every person in the world, converted, from infamy to purity, from crime to virtue, from selfishness to unselfishness, from cruelty to love, from hell to heaven even if every one of them reverted to their past, still conversion would remain the sovereign force and glory of religion. For, during the period of their conversion, however brief, the lost would have been saved, hell empty, and heaven glad; during that
period, however brief, sins which might have been committed remained for ever uncommitted; and during that period how brief or how long does not matter these people proved what the enemies of religion will not believe, with all the history of religious experience against them that the very lowest and vilest of men are capable of noble thoughts and lives of pure unselfishness, can, over and over again, disprove all the pessimism of 'heredity' and 'environment.'
And above all other considerations, this: A man once converted, or half converted, remains to the end of his days haunted by that pure memory in his life, that pure interlude when hell receded and heaven came close about his ways. I do not believe he ever becomes wholly bad.
I think he is always more conscious of a spiritual destiny than he was before the hour of his half-conversion. And from all I can gather, the man whose half-conversion ends in apparent failure, becomes, in his fall, little worse than most of us who languidly commit our sins, languidly fight against them and believe all the time that we are worthy of the tremendous things uttered by poets and prophets concerning man's immortal soul.
Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats Tantot l'homme d'en haut et tantot l'homme d'en bas; Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne.
These fallen converts, I mean, remain fighters. They may give up religion, but they maintain some kind of conflict with their lower natures. Their lapse is a sin at which we must not sneer, but which we must forgive, even with seventy-times-seven. I would ask the reader, who doubts the lastingness of conversion, who is prejudiced against this pre-eminent miracle of the religious life by the cant of a wholly bastard Christianity, and who thinks that humanity could get along very well without any religion at all, particularly emotional religion, to consider that the stories in this book are really true stories, that they represent the actual truth of poor life in London, and to reflect that
they reveal, even among the most brutal, sunken, and degraded, a craving after religious satisfactions, the denial of which would impoverish their lives and make them enemies of society. To welcome the conversion of these men is to help them and to help humanity; to forgive them and bid them strive again, even if they fall headlong back to former ruin, is Christ-like; to shrug the shoulder at them, to deny the efficacy of their regeneration, is to deny the chief insisted revelation which the Founder of Christianity announced to mankind. I believe that none of these men whose stories I have tried to tell, many of them converted for a long period of years, will ever revert; but if they should relapse all of them, I should still insist upon their temporary salvation as an argument in favour of the truth of religion, and as an argument in favour of religion as the supreme force in social regeneration.
But here follows a story of failure, apparent failure; and this story, I think, will, perhaps, more convince sceptical readers of the reality and value of conversion than any of those which have preceded it, where no question of failure arose. Also, I trust that it will create deeper sympathy for that particular religious organization whose work among the outcasts I have followed in this book, and make its methods more respected and admired by those who judge it without knowledge.
The 'angel-adjutant,' whose work made so great a change in the quarter of London we have glanced at in these pages, went from London to a large manufacturing town, where drink had created courts and slums almost as vile as any in the metropolis. She found that the corps of the Salvation Army to which she was now attached had many of the characteristics of a respectable and successful sect. The large hall was always more or less filled at the evening meetings, and by people who appeared to be prosperous, happy, and comfortable. In vain did she look for the Miserables, with broken heads and drunken faces, who had filled the back benches in London. She began to feel half afraid such is the character of religious zeal that the town was without outcasts.
But when she questioned her associates, she found that the place had Miserables enough and to spare; that there were many black slums, and that crime flourished particularly in one bad street where no one dared to breathe the name of religion. In a few days the adjutant had visited this bad street, and had laid her plans for battle.
There was one man in this quarter of the town, she discovered, who exercised more influence on the wicked than any other. He was not a criminal. He was not wholly vicious. But there was some spell of personality about him which made him a force, some strength of individuality and some charm of being, which gave him power. He was young. He was strong. Few men dared face him in fight. His bad habit was drink.
This man was married, and lived with his mother in a common lodging-house, where he ruled the unruly and kept order in vigorous fashion; drunk or sober, this man knew the etiquette of the lodginghouse and saw that it was observed. His mother was glad of him, but wished that he did useful money-earning work in the day, instead of drinking himself mad in the public-houses. Otherwise, a good son.
The adjutant perceived that if she could get this man, she would certainly draw a great many after him. She therefore concentrated her efforts on securing his sympathy. He was astonished when this when little woman in the poke bonnet waylaid him in the midst of that bad street, so astonished that he stood still and stared at her.
Throughout London, and, indeed, in almost all the great towns, these officers of the Salvation Army, both men and women, are familiar figures in the worst and most dangerous streets. Desperate men and abandoned women have these people in their midst, and do them no harm, offer them no insult. As the drunken man mentioned in a footnote in the preface said to this very adjutant, 'Never hurt the likes of you, because you care for the likes of us.'
But it happened that in this particular town the bad street had not been visited even by Salvationists. The degraded people on the
pavements and in the road, outside public-houses, and on the doorsteps of lodging-houses, stared at the Salvationist who confronted their terror and smiled in his face.
The terror himself was so taken aback that he listened.
The strategy of the adjutant took this form: she said that she was organizing a great meeting for the reclamation of drunkards and outcasts, that she was new to the town, and that those who knew it well warned her of opposition, and even of a riot at her meeting. And she concluded by saying that she had heard of this man's great strength and his powerful influence over others, and therefore had she come to him for protection. 'I am rather afraid,' she said.
He began to understand, began to be flattered.
She then asked him directly if he would come to the meeting, and if he would use his influence there to prevent lawlessness and disorder. 'I am afraid will you help me?'
The sweet face of this good woman, the confidence of her appeal, perhaps the gentleness of her voice, had an immediate effect upon this dangerous man. They roused in him all that was chivalrous and good and knightly. He became, even there in the street, and at this the very first appeal to his goodness, a different man. The adjutant had reached to some dim and mysterious field of consciousness. She had touched his soul.
The great thing,' says Professor James, 'which the higher excitabilities give is courage; and the addition and subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. "Love of adventure" becomes, in such persons, a ruling passion. "I believe," says General Skobeleff, "that my bravery is simply the passion, and at the same time
the contempt, of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure. When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me, my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist."
Such a man, with the difference made by nationality, education, and social environment, was this terror of the bad street to whom our adjutant made her appeal. It was his courage, his love of danger, which made him respond to her petition with a vigorous promise to see her through with her meeting.
That meeting filled the great hall to overflowing with the worst people in the town. The announcement that certain well-known former bad characters would speak, testify to conversion, attracted the crowd; and the rumour that Jack, their own local terror, was to be among the audience roused a widespreading curiosity.
For the first time the new hall was literally filled with those people to whom the Salvation Army makes it a most earnest part of their mission to minister the vile, the degraded, the abandoned, and the lost, those off-scourings of our nation almost entirely neglected by all other religious bodies. Jack kept order with a bullying energy till the meeting began, warning the mockers and the drunken that he would pitch them out and give them rough handling if they disturbed the little woman's entertainment.
They sang a hymn to begin with, then there was a prayer, then the adjutant read her favourite parable of the Prodigal Son. So far there was no disorder, and Jack's duties carried him no further than scowling in the direction of those he wanted to fall upon and chastise, but who, vexatiously enough, behaved with every possible propriety.
Then followed the testimonies.
Jack soon forgot to look about for disorder. He stood in the front of the standing pack which occupied the back of the hall listening. He saw men who had been prizefighters, criminals, tramps, and petty thieves standing clean and happy on the platform speaking of the joy that had come to them with conversion, and explaining that conversion meant a surrender of man's mutinous will to the will of a God allanxious to care for them. Again and again came the assurance: 'However bad any man here may feel himself to be, however hopeless and ashamed and lost he may feel, he has only to come out publicly to this penitent form, kneel down and ask God for His mercy, to have the load lifted off his soul and to feel himself strong in the strength of Almighty God to overcome all his temptations.'
When, at the end of the meeting, the formal invitation was made, among the many wretched and miserable souls who advanced to the form was the local terror who had come to keep order.
The same spirit which had impelled him to come to the meeting impelled him to the form. He was brought to see that, with all his strength and courage, drink was his master and he its slave. His honour was touched. To make a fight against such a tyrant struck him as a grand conflict, one of Victor Hugo's 'sublimes combats.' He rose up and went to the form, because it was a difficult thing to do, because it required courage. He was not drawn there, touched by compassion for the Man of Sorrows or ecstasied by love of God; he was not, perhaps, in any mood of imaginable repentance. All the changes in his brain ran into the one channel of energy: 'I am not afraid; I will do this thing; I will get the Victory.'
When the adjutant told me of this meeting, she said: 'Jack was converted from drink, but that is not the real thing.'
Nevertheless, it was a very great thing. He rose up from his knees a changed and altered man. He said he was saved meaning that he felt conscious of profound change in his spiritual being. He said he would come regularly to the meetings, and promised to bring others with him. He went out happy and confident.
Now, there was tragedy in this man's life. He had married in his youth a woman who had neither the power to keep him good nor the ability to resist in herself the contagion of his example. She had come to a state of moral feebleness which inspired in her husband nothing but disgust. He had thrashed her cruelly on many occasions, without altering her character; he now appealed to her from his vantage of respectability, equally in vain. She sank lower and lower.
To the man making his fight against drink the companionship of this poor creature was odious and sometimes maddening.
The adjutant saw how things were, tried to save the woman, tried to make the man patient under his provocation, and watched over that interesting drama with anxiety and solicitude. One day it reached her that the man had fallen back into drunkenness.
She got upon her bicycle and rode immediately to the bad street. She was half-way down the evil road when she saw him. He was in the midst of a bloody fight with his brother. Like two madmen, their faces horrible with cuts, bruises, and blood, the two men rushed and struck at each other with all the passion of murder. To interfere with those madmen seemed like madness. But the adjutant got off her bicycle, gave it to one of the crowd, and going in amongst the fighters, caught hold of her man and implored him to desist. He shook her off with a foul oath, warning her that he would strike her if she interfered, and rushed upon his brother again with added hate and new fury. There was a stable close by, with the door open. It flashed through the adjutant's brain that the crowd in the street kept up the excitement of
the fight. She waited till the brothers were locked together close to this open door, and then how she did it she does not know she threw herself upon them both, pushed them into the stable, shut the door in a flash and locked it.
Bruised and terribly wounded, the lapsed convert came to the next meeting, knelt afresh at the penitent form, and vowed that he would never again give way to drink.
The adjutant saw what fine courage this man possessed to come publicly in his shame, under the watchful eyes of his bad neighbourhood, once again to implore the forgiveness and help of God. But she feared that conversion was still incomplete, and dreaded another relapse well knowing the frightful influence of the bad wife.
Some time after came the news that the man had beaten his wife and turned her out of doors. The adjutant went to see him. He said that a good life with that woman was impossible; but now that he was free of her he intended never again to fall, never again to drink, smoke, bet, or fight, but always to keep his soul pure and strong.
Here was a problem to begin with the man's responsibility to his wife. Was he justified in turning her out of doors? Many will say Yes, angry that such a right should be questioned. The woman was bad, her influence checked the man's goodness, she stood between him and his God.
But religious people whose logic is the commandment of an absolute Master cannot give that confident answer. This husband had promised to protect his wife he had thrown her upon the streets. He had vowed before God to cherish her he had abandoned her to the world. His salvation was a selfish salvation; without hers it was not the salvation of Christ.
And yet, to take her back, perhaps to sink with her down to the abyss who could advise this dangerous course?
The adjutant, mothering the soul of this troubled man, was sorely puzzled by his problem; but the complexity of it was not yet reached.
He made his wife an allowance, they were properly separated, and he began a new life.
The change in him was really remarkable. He became smart in his appearance, clean in his habits, respectable in his way of living, and regular in his religion. He was never what one could call devout. His vision did not extend beyond the earth. The supreme influence in his soul was not celestial, but purely human; it was a desire to please the pure woman who had once appealed to his chivalry, and who had believed in him even when he lapsed again and again into sin. Through this humanity he reached into the religious sphere, so far as he was able.
The adjutant had to be content with this development of character, which seemed his utmost. She could not, being a woman, feel anything but pleasure at his devotion; she could not, being a missionary, prevent herself from feeling delight at the great change in his character; but, being a Salvationist, she remained disquieted by his distance from true spirituality, and anxious, always anxious, as to his future.
Some time had passed, and he was still a model of respectability in that foul neighbourhood, still an influence, at least for sobriety and order, in a quarter of the town where once he had been the ringleader in all things evil, when the devil once more got in his way.
Remember, that religion had changed him from a very bad man into a decent, sober, and self-respecting citizen; remember, also, that since the departure of his wife he had found it easier to maintain the battle against the pressing temptations of his neighbourhood a really terribly difficult thing to do. Remember this, before you see him in his next stage. Converted, half-converted, or not converted at all, this once quite bad man had become, under the influence of religion, a good man for the neighbourhood in which he lived, a saint.
Well, this is what happened.
He rose early one morning, in his mother's lodging-house, washed, dressed, and set off before any one was stirring for his daily work. As he opened the door, he saw the bowed figure of a woman crouched upon the steps under the porch. He took her for some poor old vagrant, who had stolen into that shelter for a night's lodging. He spoke to her briskly, but with kindness in his voice.
'Hullo!' he exclaimed, 'what are you doing here?'
She lifted her face from her knees, turned her head, and looked up at him with weary, sleepy eyes. She was quite young. She was pretty. She was pathetic in her sorrow.
He saw that she was well dressed. He noticed that there was a black shadow under one of her eyes.
'My man struck me last night,' she said, 'and I left him. I'll never go back again.' 'Your husband, you mean.' 'No, he isn't my husband.' 'What are you going to do?' 'I don't know. But I'll never go back to that one again.' 'Well, I'm sorry for you.' 'I shall do all right.'
He felt in his pockets. 'Look here,' he said, giving her some coins, 'you go and get yourself a cup of coffee. I'd do more for you if I could. Anyhow, I'm sorry. You're too young to be out in the streets.'
He nodded to her and went off.
The adjutant says, not bitterly, and quite gently, that the devil entered into that girl on the doorstep. I rather think that the kind words of the man, and the masculine compassion in his attractive eyes, melted something in the heart of the poor forsaken creature and filled her
with a new hope. Perhaps they were the kindest words she had ever heard. Perhaps the man was the best man she had ever set eyes upon. If one considers her position the doorstep of a lodging-house on a bitter winter's morning, an entire loneliness in the midst of the great cold, uncharitable world and then endeavours to imagine the effect of kind words and compassionate eyes, there will be, I think, no need to drag in the agency of the devil to understand what followed. Remember that she was little more than a child.
The man came back from his work. The girl was waiting for him in the street. He had thought about her during the day. He was not sorry to see her there again. Something in her pretty face and pathetic eyes had appealed to him.
The girl stopped him, and spoke to him. They stood a few minutes in the street outside his home, talking together in low voices. He thought over what she had to say to him, and then they walked off together.
In a day or two the adjutant knew that this convert was keeping a mistress.
But here, to begin with, was a problem he came as usual to the meetings in the hall, and maintained his religious bearing. Was he a hypocrite? One becomes impatient of such crude questions. Nevertheless, was it possible for the Army to countenance a man living in open sin? One great side of its work among the poor is for domestic purity. Very few people, perhaps, know how great a problem is presented to the social reformer in the slums by this vexed question of marriage. The Salvation Army has done, and is doing, an immense work for the sanctity of marriage. It has done, and is doing, this great work under conditions of heartbreaking difficulty. The law which permits husband and wife to separate without granting them that divorce which alone can enable them to marry again, has made for great immorality. Almost every man and woman so separated, thousands every year, find a mate and form a union unsanctioned by religion or State. The thousands, tens of thousands, of boys and girls who marry every year and then separate over poverty, drunkenness,
or brutality, spread a vast influence over the community making for contempt of religious responsibility in the sacrament of marriage. The number of illicit unions in the poor quarters of London is extraordinarily great, and every year witnesses a further and wider weakening of the marriage bond. Against this deplorable condition of things so dangerous to the State, so unhappy for posterity the Salvation Army has opposed the strictest idea of purity. The most powerful weapon in its hand when combating misery and wretchedness is the shining testimony of the happy home, where religion consecrates the love of man and woman and creates the beauty of the family. The Army, working in the vilest parts of London, insists upon purity. No force, I really think, is doing more in the worst parts of England for the sacredness of marriage on which so much depends than this saving host of missionaries working by the ancient reed of conversion.
Well, what could the adjutant do in this matter? Was she to forbid the man to come to meetings, as the Church would assuredly forbid him her sacraments, and by so doing thrust him back into his old excesses, his old lost state of depravity and sin? It was a difficult matter. One course was open to her that seemed right and hopeful, an appeal to his awakened conscience.
She saw him alone and spoke to him. At first he denied the charge anxious for the adjutant's regard then, when she smiled reproachfully, so sad for that lie, and said that she knew the truth he protested that he was only standing between the poor forsaken girl and the world that was ready to ruin her. But the adjutant pressed her charge with kindly and gentle sympathy, and at last he looked her straight in the eyes and said, 'I won't deceive you; I care for her.'
Then came the appeal to his awakened conscience, would he give her up? He was living with her in sin, he was injuring her soul as well as his own, he was not following Christ Who had done so much for him, but was actually turning his back upon that pure Saviour would he give her up? Help her to be good? Help his own soul to be innocent and pure?
No; he would not give her up.
The man had reason on his side. The problem lay in the sound reasonableness of his position. He said the girl loved him purely, and helped him to live a good life. He said that he had now got, for the first time, a home that was happy. He declared that without the love of this girl he could not face the world. If she had dragged him down, if she had made him indifferent to religion, he would have thrown her off. But, no; her influence was all for goodness, kindness, decency, respectability, and happiness. She was helping him. He could not see the crime or the sin of living with her. In his sin he had married a woman who dragged his soul to hell; in his regeneration he had found a woman who braced his strength for goodness. If the law freed him from his wife, he could marry this girl; if the law would not free him, he would stand by her, protect her, cherish her, love her to the hour of his death. No one should come between him and this good girl, who made him happy.
However reasonable this position, it was a position clean contrary to the injunctions of religion. From the point of view of the present world, the man's logic was unassailable. But religion looks to two worlds. What appears so unreasonable in Christianity is the logic which embraces the universe. Christianity is not a code of morals; it is a religion. It is not a terrestrial religion; it is a cosmical religion. For those who believe in it, all its injunctions, however hard and apparently unreasonable, are easy and just, because its purpose is the evolution and development of a spirit unbounded by time and place, and created for immortality.
The distressed and affectionate adjutant, confronted by this great problem, could only preach her gospel, could only insist upon its insistence. That insistence is emphatic enough. ' Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' Professor James speaks about 'the divided self '; religion comes to heal the division, to consummate a unity. A hundred familiar phrases rise to one's mind.' Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.' Empty thy heart, says an old mystic, of all which may 'hinder that immediate Contact, that
Central Touch between thee and thy God.' 'The Perfection of the Soul is her union with God.' 'What must the condition of those Wretched Spirits be, who have no more union with God than what is just enough to sustain them in Being . . . what must the Darkness, what the Poverty, what the Barrenness, what the Coldness, Dryness, Deadness, Emptiness, Desolation, and Solitude of such a State! Depart from Me ye cursed! I need not add into Everlasting Fire, for here we have hell enough already.'
It is religion which unifies the dual nature of man, which saves him from the conflict by fixing his purpose and his affection on one subject, his Creator and his God. This is what mystics call 'the Unitive way of Religion.' We must understand that position, before we can realize the ability of such fine and compassionate natures as those which follow Christ into the dark places of our civilization, to preach an unequivocal gospel to the sad and sorrowful for whom they feel so profoundly. One must perceive that these people definitely and with a great assurance believe that no single soul can be happy, at peace with itself, or secure in its evolution, which is not united with the Will of God. It is because of this great assurance that they are so relentless in their preaching of utter holiness. Consider for a moment these two striking testimonies:
'My sadness,' says Adolphe Monod, 'was without limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external acts to the most sacred thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings, my judgement, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource save in some influence from without. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul,;n that, namely, of a real, external, supernatural
action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as He is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title to His mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interior life began for me; not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little, did the rest.'
'God,' says Martin Luther, 'is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and His nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to His own natural and proper work. Therefore, God must take that maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again, and say, "Now I am bruised and afflicted enough: now is the time of grace: now is the time to hear Christ." The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience. "If I live," saith he, "I will amend my life: I will do this. I will do that." But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and anguish lay hold upon Christ Who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits? What shall all these do? What shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to Him, what needed He to deliver Himself for me? If I, being a wretched and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given? But because there was no
other price, therefore He delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God Himself, entirely and wholly "for me," even "for me," I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to myself. And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith. For He died not to justify the righteous, but the unrighteous, and to make them the children of God.'
Such is the faith of Salvationists, and such was the gospel, she had no other, which the little angel-adjutant of the slums had to preach to her convert. It is necessary for the reader to make himself well acquainted with the inexorable and unalterable gospel which the Salvationists insist upon with the lost and the evil.