William Booth

I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without G…

Let the business of the world take care of itself. My business is to get the world saved; if this involves the standing still of the looms and the shutting up of the factories, and the staying of the sailing of the ships…

Go for souls and go for the worst.

While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while…

Rescue the perishing. There they are all around you everywhere, crowds upon crowds, multitudes. Be skilful. Improve yourself. Study your business.

Just so, my comrades, when we, the soldiers and servants whom God has set to the business of saving men, are prepared to pay the price, we shall see the Divine result, and never till then.

Men and women who will die at their post are the very sort in demand just now in The Salvation Army and elsewhere. They are what the world needs; what we are praying for, and what God wants.

Holiness to the Lord is to us a fundamental truth; it stands in the front rank of our doctrines. We inscribe it upon our banners. It is with us in no shape or form an open debatable question as to whether God can sanctif…

YOUR SALVATION ARMY HAS BEEN MADE TO ACCOMPLISH THE IMPOSSIBLE, and conquer that which to human calculations cannot be overcome. FORWARD! If you will only go forward, and go forward on the lines here indicated, you will…

Without excuses and self-consideration of health, or limb, or life; true soldiers fight, live to fight, love to fight, love the thickest of the fight, and die in the midst of it.

A GOOD SOLDIER MAKES WAR HIS BUSINESS. He may do something in other lines of duty: he may be a farrier, a tailor, a shoemaker, a servant, or what not, but after all fighting is his trade. He has chosen it, and made secon…

What is the business of your life? Not merely to save your soul—win the bread that perisheth not, and make yourself meet for Paradise? If it was so, if this were all; would it not be an ignoble and selfish lot for which…

There is a hell. A hell as dark and terrible as is the description given of it by the lips of Jesus Christ, the truthful. And into that hell men are departing hour by hour. While we write men are going away into everlast…

People die and go to hell because nobody will be at the trouble and expense to save them. Let the country side turn out. Cut a way through. Know no impossibilities. If you cannot reach the perishing souls one way, try an…

To form an idea of the immense amount of good, temporal and spiritual, which the Slum Sister is doing; you need to follow them into the kennels where they live, preaching the Gospel with the mop and the scrubbing brush,…

The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; r…

But how is Thrift to benefit those who have nothing? What is the use of the gospel of Thrift to a man who had nothing to eat yesterday, and has not threepence to-day to pay for his lodging to-night?

To attempt to save the Lost, we must accept no Limitations to human brotherhood.

The Scheme of Social Salvation is not worth discussion which is not as wide as the Scheme of Eternal Salvation set forth in the Gospel. The Glad Tidings must be to every creature, not merely to an elect few who are to be…

I claim it for the Lost, for the Outcast, for the Disinherited of the World.

Well, if I am to put it into one sentence, I would say that I made up my mind that God Almighty should have all there was of William Booth.

Christianity itself would never have triumphed over the Paganism of ancient Rome had the early Christians not been enabled to testify from the dungeon and the arena as to the sincerity and serenity of soul with which the…

But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked sailor who is battling wit…

At the risk of being misunderstood and misrepresented, I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.

Yet something else must be done if Christianity is not to be a mockery to perishing men.

As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation from pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to all. They may reject it, of course.…

This Submerged Tenth--is it, then, beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die?

Darkest England, then, may be said to have a population about equal to that of Scotland. Three million men, women, and children a vast despairing multitude in a condition nominally free, but really enslaved;--these it is…

The denizens in Darkest England; for whom I appeal, are (1) those who, having no capital or income of their own, would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively dependent upon the money earned by the…

But this book is no mere lamentation of despair. For Darkest England, as for Darkest Africa, there is a light beyond. I think I see my way out, a way by which these wretched ones may escape from the gloom of their misera…

As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our very doors, and discover withi…

My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing…