From the time when, at twelve years of age, General
Bramwell Booth was taken by his father into a public house and told, "Willie. these are our people—the people I want
you to work for. and bring to Christ,"- to his later years -when by special permission of Edward VII.. he attended the Coronation in the uniform of the Salvation Army, the author of Echoes and Memories (Hodder and Stoughton, 7s. 6d.), tells an intensely human story of his life-work... The .passages dealing with the volcanic energy of his great father, and of the old General's amalgam of hardness with a vein of the most exquisite tenderness, and of the "signs and wonders" of his ministry are of great interest. The author describes how at one !` All-Night of Prayer," following a half-yearly Council of War; a powerful North-Country pitman was prostrated by the Holy Ghost, while a certain Blandy "entered into full liberty, and then shouted, wept, clapped hands, danced, amid a scene of the most glorious and heavenly enthusiasm. Others mean- while were lying prostrate on the floor, some of them :groaning 'aloud for perfect deliverance." Masi hysteria? Yet the Salvation Army has struck a note of social service in England and beyond the seas that shall ring high above the factions of our time. The fights and early struggles of the Army are recounted vividly, and we have glimpses of great clergymen; politicians and lawyers, sketched boldly, in action, rather than gossiped about in the manner of the average memoir: We read; for instance, how Dr. Benson (later Archbishop) spent an hour on his knees at a Salvation Army meeting and how, with a 'vision beyond his day, he saw the Army "as a fourth part Ol ;Israel . . . as trees which the Lord hath planted " ; hoi Stead came to write his "Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon " ; how Lord Oxford and Asquith gave legal advice to the Salvation Army and how—according to our author----r: he might have been "as great as Gladstone" had he had more emotion in his mental make-up ; and how the authcii went to a reformed drunkard in Whitechapel for spiritual help, and how when they knelt down together it seemed to Mr. :Bramwell Booth that this costermonger-inebriate-wife-beater
was as a man speaking with an angel tongue, and how later they would eat together a piece of bacon and sonic potatoes. "It was a veritable sacrament. . .. I have come dowp
those old squeaking stairs feeling as if I walked on wind." Nirelco-me to this wonderfully good story of a noble work. It comes like sun and sea-breeze after the mephitic fumes which Mr. Trotsky has thrust under our nostrils.
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