By The Rev. G. CAMPBELL MORGAN,
D.D.
The founder of the Salvation Army was bom in a suburb of Nottingham in 1829. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a pawnbroker. In his own phrase, his was a blighted childhood '.
As a lad, his grimly serious yet passionate nature was attracted by the wild idealism of Chartists and Methodists. At seventeen he was a revivalist preacher and when he moved to London in 1849 he made the most of his wider opportunities. Marriage with the daughter of a Clapham carriage-builder, a woman of culture, put a finer temper on his raw zeal.
But his fiery individualism could not tolerate the discipline of Methodism. After nine years in the Methodist ministry he broke away in 1861, and four years later, with Mrs. Booth, founded his own Christian Mission in Whitechapel. In 1878 the Mission became the ' Salvation Army ' and its leader one of the most abused men in England. In 1890 the storm reached a climax when Booth published ' In Darkest England ' and ' unroofed the slum of Victorian respectability '. But during the last twenty years of his life he found himself almost a national hero.