Our demand is hard; aye, very hard. Yes, we don't mince matters
in soul-saving. We demand the whole of a man, not a little bit of him,
or three-fourths of him, or two-thirds of him; we demand every drop of
his blood and every beat of his heart and every thought of his brain.
Yes, it's a hard discipline--hard because the standard is so high. I
hope it is not too hard."
His son has never once, so far as my knowledge goes, questioned even the
extremest of Salvation Army Regulations. The more extreme they are, the
more they please him. It is one of his many good sayings that you cannot
make a man clean by washing his shirt. His scrubbing brush is apt, I
think, to remove some of the skin with the dirt. He believes without
question that the only human test of conversion is the uttermost
willingness of the soul to be spent in the service of soul-saving. If a
man wishes to keep anything back from God, his heart is not given to
God. He is no emotionalist in this matter. He uses emotion to break down
the resistance of a sinner, but when once the surrender is made reason
takes command of the illumined soul. He was asked on one occasion if he
did not regard emotion as a dangerous thing. "Not when it is organised,"
was his reply.
The only concession he seems willing to make to the critics of the
Salvation Army is in the matter of its hymns. He confesses that some of
those hymns are crude and unlovely; but examine this confession and you
find that it is only the language which causes him uneasiness.
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