GENERAL BOOTH'S SUCCESSORS
By E. H. JEFFS AT first sight " the High Council of the Salvation Army " may seem a rather too imposing title. But the forty-seven veteran officers who meet at Clapton next Tuesday to elect a new General are the representa- tives of a " concern " (William Booth's word) which has earned the right to use large phrases. Moreover the task of the High Council is indeed of high and world-wide importance. The General of the Salvation Army holds an office which is certainly without parallel in Protestant Christianity for the weight of personal power and respon- sibility which . it carries with it. The Generalship is still a virtual autocracy. Though the High Council of 1929 made the office elective, it did not tamper with its functions. General Higgins will hand on to his successor, after nearly six years of firm and tactful rule, the honour and burden of an undivided authority.
It is a tribute to the present holder of the office to say that the Generalship is now definitely " open to the talents." There is peace within. the Army—though no doubt whispering and intrigue might be discovered here and there, as in all military organizations in which questions of rank and promotion loom large. Two 'members of the Booth family, Commander Eva Booth and Commissioner Catherine Booth, will be present at the High Council, and will, of course, be eligible for the command. But the name of Booth is now, happily, neither a clear asset nor a clear liability to a candidate. The Council will feel free to Vote for the fittest man or woman it can find. The issue is too big for the intrusion of any other principle in the coming election.
The Salvation Army today is one of the greatest ` going concerns " in the world—and the most dependent upon wise leadership. Its General has to keep his eye upon two immense constituencies. He has to hold the allegiance and enthusiasm of his 27,000 com- missioned officers and his 119,000 unpaid local officers; and he has to retain the confidence of those millions of the general public who, in many lands, provide the funds for the Army's myriad social services. At the moment both constituencies are happy and satisfied. What are the prospects for the future ?
So far as " the world's good word " is concerned, the Salvation Army was never in a stronger position than it is today. Its work in the slums, its shelters for down- and-out men and women, its homes for children, its maternity hospitals, its medical missions abroad—the whole range of its institutional activities, in short— may be said to be endowed in perpetuity by the spon- taneous goodwill of the public. Soine of the Army's social experiments may have failed, but none by reason of a lack of ready giving. Even the public-house popu- lation becomes good-humouredly generous when the girl in the Army bonnet invades the bar with her War Cries. But the bulk of the Army's income repre- sents the graver feeling within the various Churches that the Army is doing a species of work which Christian people ought to do, but which calls for a special sort of machinery and a special type of worker—the machinery and the worker, in short, provided by the Army alone.
An immense " plant " for personal social service, so generally valued that the world will not willingly let it die : this is the Army's first security for continued prosperity. Another, and an increasingly strong security, is the international nature of the Army's work. The Salvationist International is the Protestant equivalent of the supra-nationalism of Rome. The Army flag flies in fifty-eight countries and colonies. An Australian officer commands in one of the " Territories " in America ; a Swede in Brazil ; a Dane in Hungary ; and so on. Respected by the masses in all these nations, and trusted by their various Governments, the Army is undoubtedly one of the most valuable and valued influences now making for international goodwill and conciliation.
The basis of this world-wide service was, and is, the hard and humble labour of the Salvation Army corps officer—the familiar figure, man or woman, who leads the meeting at the street-corner or in the little red-brick citadel. Will the Salvation Army continue to recruit enough of " that article " (as Wellington described his private of the Line) in these times of changing religious speech and thought ? At present there is no shortage of candidates. The strength of the Army in this respect lies in its genius for the practical and the positive. On paper its theology seems too hopelessly Fundamentalist to survive, even among the least educated classes. In practice, however, the Salvationist officer is trained to preach such an entirely positive gospel as might conunend itself to anyone holding, generally, an evangelical view of religion. It is worth noting that of all the scores of books issued from the Army's Press not one has dealt controversially with theo- logical issues. The reward of this wise positiveness lies here—that the Army continues to enlist men and women of varying theological tempers, whose desire is to do practical Christian service unhampered by speculative hesitations. To these recruits the Army discipline is no hardship ; at all events not a psychological hardship. Everyone else, they` reflect,*effect, seems to be arguing about religion. The Salvation Army is all the time putting it to the test, win or lose.
It is this practicality which largely accounts for the presence of so many able men in the higher ranks of the Army ; financial experts like Commissioner Mapp, for example, or genuine statesmen like Commissioner David Lamb, whose services in the sphere of Empire emigration were recognized recently by the award of a C.M.G. Many of those men have deliberately chosen the Army as a field in which they can devote their practical gifts whole-heartedly to the cause of "'God and the poor." They are not drawn to the Army by its theology, though they may have no great difficulty in subscribing to it. They are attracted by the spectacle of a religious body which sets all its members to work.
Another part of the wise tradition of the Army—and it is only fair to trace the beginnings of the tradition to William and Bramwell Booth—is its combination of a passionate concern for the poor with a total rejection of political and economic theorizing. It is significant that Salvationists seldom or never speak, as many Free Church preachers do, of " the Kingdom of God on earth." But it is also significant that they never speak, as some Angli- ean preachers do, of " the menace of Communism." They are not concerned to preserve an existing order or to bring in a new one. They are only concerned to succour the victims of social wrong, and to preach and to live that gospel of love and service which they hold to be the funda- mental law of any sound social order.
All this will doubtless continue to exercise a strong attraction upon men and women who seek an active and serviceable vocation. Given a continuance of the wisdom and ability which have hitherto distinguished its leader- ship. and a continuance of the apostolic fervour and sim- plicity which have caused its uniform to be honoured wherever it goes, the Salvation Army may face with con- fidence the tasks and tests of this new world which is so strangely different from that in which it had its birth— different in almost every respect except that it still needs saving, either from the Devil or from itself.
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