The Salvation Army

When Toynbee Hall was established in 1884 the Salvation Army was a little more than four years old. Like the settlements it had grown out of an experiment in Whitechapel, and like them it evangelized the urban poor. To William Booth and his followers, however, the ideas and the strategy of people like Samuel Barnett appeared mistaken. The attempt to bring the culture of the educated classes to the poor seemed to them a misreading of God's will. Booth's wife Catherine remarked in her last address that Christ came to save the world, not to civilize it; and she said of those people who put any hope in education: ‘you cannot reform man morally by his intellect; this is the mistake of most social reformers. You must reform man by his Soul!’ ⁶³² William Booth often joined issue with reformers who tried, as residents of settlements did, to improve the environment of the working classes. The world needed salvation alone, he said. ‘You don't need to mix up any other ingredients with the heavenly remedy.’ ⁶³³ When he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette during the controversy over The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in 1883, it was to warn against faith in ‘social arrangements’, against ‘the attempt to deal with the great social difficulty as though it had no deeper cause than a want of bricks and mortar. The first and great thing to be done by those who would improve the condition of the wretched is to get at their hearts.’ ⁶³⁴ His wife made this point more starkly when she cried, in 1881:

Oh! how I see the emptiness and vanity of everything compared with the salvation of the soul. What does it matter if a man dies in the workhouse? If he dies on a doorstep covered with wounds, like Lazarus – what does it matter if his soul is saved? ⁶³⁵

This indifference to temporal circumstances could be overcome only if it occurred to Booth that destitution might so corrode a man as to put him beyond the reach of salvation. In the first years of his holy war, such a thought was far from Booth's mind. There was a difference even more obvious between the settlements and the Salvation Army. The Booths believed that the divisions in English society made it impossible for envoys from the rich to reach the masses for Christ. They created the Salvation Army because they were convinced that the poor could be made Christians only (as Mrs Booth put it) ‘by people of their own class, who would go after them in their own resorts, who would speak to them in a language they understood, and reach them by means suited to their own tastes.’ ⁶³⁶