Cadets and Love for Souls
by
General Bramwell Booth
From book 'Training Staff Council Lectures 1925'
*Editor's note - This article has undergone
some editing in length and vocabulary.
'Love for souls' embraces so much of the life and work of The
Salvation Army that it might almost be said to be an
alternative name for the whole Organisation. I can imagine
some holy being just arrived from another world asking 'What
is The Salvation Army?' and being answered in terms according
to his own understanding. 'The Salvation Army is love for
souls.'
Love is the attraction, which has brought us together as an
Army. It is the uniting principle, which, in spite of many
differences in race, language, character, and temperament, has
made us one. Love is more than this. It is the sustaining
force of the Movement. Without love, The Army, no matter how
powerful, or useful, or popular, would be a dead thing. With
love, The Army, no matter how small, or poor, or despised, is
a living Branch in the True Vine of the Kingdom of God on
earth.
Love is more than mere feeling; love is a willing. We often
hear the word 'benevolence' used to denote love, and rightly
so. Benevolence comes from the Latin benevolentia, meaning the
will to love or to bless. That great principle, the will, is a
part of love. It is to a certain extent within man's power to
love. He can will to love. Indeed, without the will, love
would not be love: it would be a mere
sentiment. Love between a man and woman, unless there be will
in it – a genuine purpose or will on the part of each for the
good of the other – must, under pressure or change of
circumstances, pass away. The will to love, the determination,
'I will be a lover,' is vital to the maintenance of
tenderness, compassion and sympathy between husband and wife;
indeed, between any lovers, human or divine.
In emphasising the importance of the will, I do not want to
detract from the power and glory of the emotional part of
love. Emotion, the movement of the heart to pour out its
riches, this more than anything else, except Holiness – and
Holiness could not be without love – makes man like God, who,
because He loved, gave His only-begotten Son to bless the
world of sinners. Never let a word escape your lips,
especially when dealing with Cadets, in disparagement of
emotion or tenderness of feeling. By all means guard them
against being swayed by mere sentiment, but never let them
disesteem that outflow of emotion and tenderness, which so
beautifully characterises the lives of those who truly love.
Love at its highest, the will and the feeling melted into one,
brought The Salvation Army into being. The Army was raised as
a special manifestation of love for souls – for the souls of
sinners. When William Booth was asked what had been the
compelling influence of his life, he said that it was 'an
ardent, holy love for God and souls.' He was, to use his own
words, impelled by 'the impulses and urgings of an undying
ambition to save souls.'
Everything that we can know or learn about the Founders' lives
indicates that, from first to last, an unselfish love impelled
them in all that they did and said and planned. Many of you
have heard me say of the Founder, that when preaching in
chapels before The Salvation Army was born, his heart was with
the churchless multitude outside.From the pulpit he could
sometimes see out of the windows, and while speaking to his
congregation he would often be saying to God in his heart,
'Oh, these people here have the light, they know the truth;
but outside are the multitudes for whom not man cares! My
heart is out there.' The love that produced The Salvation Army
sustains us today. We want that love above all else implanted
in the hearts of all Cadets.
Implanting Love in the Cadet
My purpose is to point out some means by which this love
may be established as the ruling influence in the Cadet's
heart. It is a difficult task. They are not always loving
natures upon which we haveto work. Love is alien to their
make-up. It may be dormant, but so profound is the sleep that
it seems as if only by magic can the awakening come! When they
come to us many of them are servants to that which is harmful
to love. Much in their characters, in their lives, sometimes
in their habits, is discouraging. Many of them are selfish.
They are accustomed to consider themselves in everything.
Every circumstance, even the most trivial, calls forth the
query, 'What about me? Where do I come in?' but the language
of love is ' Never mind me!'
Some who come to the Training Garrisons with a sincere desire
to serve God are hard in their make-up. Any latent tenderness
in their natures has never been cultivated. The circumstances
of their lives have been such as to harden them. Many of them
have had very little affection shown to them. Talking to one
Cadet – a cold-blooded sort of fish whom I wanted to help – I
asked whether any one had ever kissed him.He thought I meant,
had any girl kissed him! 'Oh, no; no one has ever kissed me!'
he said, quickly and emphatically. 'Surely you can recall
whether your mother ever kissed you?' I asked. 'My mother
wasn't that sort,' was his reply.
Again, some whom you are asked to train are by nature fickle,
quick to change. That characteristic is unfriendly to love.
The person who is played upon by every wind that blows, who
passes rapidly from one kind of feeling to another, is not
fertile soil for the heavenly plant of love. Some, especially
the more educated type, are inclined, by training and
temperament, to repress and starve their love. They do
violence to their natural feelings by cultivating the habit of
repression. They have been trained to bottle up their
emotions. They may even cultivate a kind of cynicism as a
self-protection against any display of feeling. The
consequence is that this part of their nature has become
crippled like the Chinese women's feet – dwarfed againstnature.
Others – and this is a far more serious matter – are lacking
in the first principle of love for souls in that they do not
deeply love God. If more affection flowed from them as
individuals towards Him who is the Fountain of Affection, they
would be more ready to receive our help and instruction.
Yet each Cadet comes to us more or less in the spirit of 'Here
I am; do what you can with me.' There is our opportunity – to
make of every Cadet a lover.
Perhaps because I am getting older, I see more clearly than
ever the wonderful truth hidden in a few words the dear
Founder said to me in one of our last talks together. Towards
the end he was unable to converse for long at a time, but he
uttered sentences and etched expressions. His normal condition
was restless. He was always in life a kind of travelling
earthquake! He was restless when he was dying! But in an
interval of quiet one evening he stretched his hand over the
bed to take hold of mine, and said, 'Bramwell, I have been
looking back, and let me tell you, Love is all.'
Yes, love is all, and if we fail in planting this great power
in the hearts and lives of the Cadets we fail with them
altogether. None of us would desire to spend our precious time
making mere professors of Salvationism. We do not want to turn
out a people painted to look like Salvationists. We want men
and women on whose lives at last may be written, 'Love is
all.'
Drink at the Fountain of Divine Love
You will not plant this love in the hearts of the Cadets
unless you love them. I do beg that you will drink at the
Fountain of Divine Love yourselves. Divine Love is different
from human love in this: that man must be daily baptized with
it. Human love may endure against all odds without much
effort. Once deeply embedded, I doubt if it ever really dies.
But if we are to be lovers of the Divine Lover, whose love is
ever flowing to us, we must will daily to love Him. We must go
perpetually to the Fountain. We must put ourselves in the
place for daily baptism.
Then we must be lovers of souls. Perhaps more than most Staff
Officers, some of you are withdrawn from actual contact with
sinners in the mass. But true love carries us to those whom we
love when theyare in misery and bondage. We feel ashamed to be
glad when they are sad, to be lifted up with joy when they are
cast down with grief, to be filled when they are hungry. True
love for souls will take you in prayer into the haunts of the
lost. It will open many opportunities of wayside contact with
the sinner. Many ways will present themselves of pointing him
to Christ. And there is this fact, not least of all, that if
love for sinners burns in your heart, the Cadets will catch
its glow and warmth. Their own love for souls will increase
thereby, and you will be sending out men and women in
hundreds, perhaps in thousands, to succour the multitude you
will never see, and to bring to Christ magdalens and prodigals
of whose existence you do not even know.
Love One Another
Next, strive by every available means to help your Cadets
to love each other. Let them begin by loving you. Do not be
afraid to allow their hearts to receive from yours that which
is so precious, and to find in you that which they can
appreciate and admire. Your example must have great power with
them, and, if you love them, they will naturally give some of
their love to you. You do not, of course, want to attach them
to you except in so far as you can lead them to God and attach
them to The Army; but do not repel the offering of
appreciation and affection they bring you while they are in
the Garrison. How can they love the lost outside the fold if
they fail to love the saved within the fold? Does not that
wonderful commandment which Jesus Christ gave through John,
'Love one another,' imply that unless we have a warm, pure
love for each other there will be a poor chance of our loving
anybody else; that to 'Love on another' is the first short
step towards that height from which after a while we shall
love the whole world? Therefore, do your utmost to help the
Cadets to love one another, to be patient with one another, to
show kindness to one another to the extent of self-denial, to
enter into one another's feeling, to prefer one another in
honour.
Help them to find pleasure when they see a fellow Cadet
excelling on the platform, or in the visiting, or in the
examinations. Save them ever from envy and jealousy. Help them
to show humility, which is one of the first graces born of
love. Where there is no humility there is no love. Humility
yields its own and seeks the interests of others before its
own. If a Cadet has been unkind to another, bring him into the
spirit in which he will ask forgiveness. There is plenty of
time in the training period for the development and exercise
of all the graces which spring from love, plenty of
opportunity to help the Cadets in these ways and to draw out
their hearts.
Then I would say, encourage sympathy with such sinners as may
especially stir their individual hearts. Perhaps when
'fishing' in a Meeting a Cadet's heart will be particularly
drawn out to some person whom you may happen to think not
worthy of his attention. Do not snub that Cadet. Even if the
object of his interest is worthless – ought we not to hesitate
before we say that anybody is worthless? - do not on any
account tell the Cadet so. If his or her heart is drawn out to
this poor, worthless creature, take advantage of that to try
and develop the Cadet's affection and feeling through love for
that soul. The same applies to visiting. Cadets will become
concerned about particular people; for example, the sick and
dying, or the very poor, and will come back to the Garrison
full of this or that case. Try and arrange for such Cadets to
follow up the individual in whom they have become interested,
so that, their hearts being moved and stirred, you can draw
them out further.
Encourage them to pray for people in whom they are specially
interested. Prayer strengthens and enlarges love. I have had
some of the richest blessings from the hand of God, especially
in recent years, in pleading with Him for particular people in
whom I have been interested in my own Meetings, especially
backsliders. My heart is always tender to backsliders. They
suffer so much. They have such troubles. They feel (especially
if they have been in The Army any length of time and enjoyed
its comradeship) so isolated – left like refuse on the shore.
In my own spirit I have been so blessed and touched in
pleading with God for some particular man or woman who has
drawn out my sympathy. I shall soon be seventy years of age,
if God allows me to live long enough, and here I am, after
nearly sixty years of soul-saving work and trying to bless the
people and word for God, and my own heart is touched and made
tender, my love for souls is increased, and I am made to
realise my own need, while I am praying for particular souls.
If that is so with me I am sure that such prayer will affect
the Cadets, and enlarge their love, even more powerfully
through the very fact of their inexperience. God will draw
very near to them when they pray for others, and their own
hearts will be drawn out to Him. Encourage them to pray for
souls.
The Value of Souls
Help the Cadets to dwell on the value of souls. Try and
show them how to study the people. The souls of men are like
books in a library, of which the outsides only are visible; to
be understood they must be studied. Even when read most
carefully, much in them will be found to be in an unknown
tongue unless the Holy Ghost interpret it. Make the Cadet feel
that he ought to be able to take the book from the shelf, and
that when he has opened it, he ought to have sufficient
knowledge of its language to enable him to read. Help him to
see that to these people belongs an eternal future; that even
the worst and lowest and most degraded of them has powers
which point to another life and another world – powers of the
spirit, a capacity for worship, for God, power to think, to
reason; above all, power to love. Sometimes it seems to me
that failure – even ruin – help to prove the immortality of
the soul. A blighted soul is like a plant, which, in an
unfavourable climate, cannot flower, or if it flower, cannot
bring its seed to perfection. The plant lives, struggles, and
comes to maturity of a kind, but is never perfected. When we
look at it we say that there must be a clime somewhere where
that flower can blossom, where that seed can be perfected and
fall fertile into the soil. Let the Cadets be inspired with
love and hope so that they will still hope for the uttermost
failures, so that they will never despair of drawing the worst
and vilest into the Kingdom.
The Cadets will be helped to bless souls if they realise the
immense possibilities for development which lie before the
individual. Just think what it means to be capable of eternal
growth, continual advance! How wonderfully people develop here
when they bring themselves into the full sunshine of God's
will! Do you not often feel that the transformations which
take place in the Cadets themselves are almost a miracle? You
can see some of them growing. Look at ourselves. Think what we
were ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Look at what we
have become. We do not detract from – rather we add to – the
glory we want to give to God when we confess what progress we
have made, what signs we see in our lives of growthunder His
hand.
And that development is going on forever. I think highly now
of many of you here, but I do not know what you will yet be.
Think of what Yamamuro will be a thousand years hence! When I
look at saved people who do not become what one had hoped, who
wobble and shirk, who do not know their own minds and get
astray in their devotion, I often say to myself, 'They are
only in their childhood; there is going to be another life;
they will be better by and by; there is a better day coming.'
And that thought encourages me.
But just as souls have infinite capacity for growth in
goodness, so they have infinite capacity for growth in
badness. Make the Cadets feel that a man's decision here is so
tremendously important just because, if he does not range
himself at the Cross, his life on earth will be a prelude to
eternal progression downward, in what is bad. How true it is
that 'he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way
shall save a soul from death and shall hide a multitude of
sins.' I can recall the very hour, the very spot, where that
truth really seized me when I was a little more than a boy. I
had thought about it often, and had heard it spoken of at
home. Religion was going strong in our house all the time! But
one day it came home to me that every sinner we rescued was
rescued from an eternal progression in evil. This idea changed
many things in my life. If you can find some powerful means of
bringing that truth home to Cadets, you will be doing much to
develop their character and intensify their devotion.
The Eternal Wrath
I rely upon you to instruct the Cadets about retribution
and the operation of that law. Convince them of retribution,
and you bring to bear on them influences which evidently
played a powerful part in Jesus Christ's life and experience.
Convince them of retribution, and they will feel something of
Jesus Christ's compassion for the wandering and the lost,
something of His passion to save souls at any cost to Himself.
No teacher so continually taught the great fact of retribution
as did Jesus Christ. He realised – His words say so clearly –
the tremendous fact that broken law must bring punishment,
separation, and misery. If they saw the inevitableness of
punishment and the separation from God, which is the darkest
part of what is meant by Hell, I feel certain that any of
those about whose slowness of heart you mourn, would rouse
themselves out of lethargy, out of the 'take it easy' attitude
which some assume towards the work they are to do.
I have no doubt that some Cadets pass through conflicts as to
the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is of the greatest
importance how they come through those conflicts. You should
deal personally, if possible with any Cadet who is having a
struggle of this kind. Make him feel that no change is
possible in the principle which God has laid down, 'whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' That is in the nature
of life, and no more to be escaped than we can escape from the
fact that two and two make four.
Many of us have passed through very dark and trying
experiences about this particular truth; but we would not be
without those struggles, for we learned in them a great
lesson. For myself, I can say that I learned that in this, as
in all else, I must go to Jesus Christ and learn of Him. In
Him I found the solution of my difficulty. If you read His
words you will find that He said more about Hell than about
Heaven, and the words He used are His own words. He was the
first to speak of Hell fire and to portray the dungeon into
which evil men are to be cast forever. It was He who first
spoke of the worm that dieth not and of the fire that is not
quenched. It was He who spoke of the weeping and wailing and
gnashing of teeth.
Many Cadets find it a cross to speak those words – a cross to
warn the sinner of judgement and doom. But do you not think it
was also a cross to Jesus Christ? Do you not think that that
wonderful Being of light, of love, and tenderness, must have
felt with the greatest intensity the agony of having to
proclaim these truths to those for whom He came to die? We
must teach the Cadets to follow their Master and take up that
cross, to enter into this fellowship of His sufferings.
The Wonders of Mercy
But just as definitely as you must help them to see the
inevitableness of eternal separation from God for those who do
not turn to the Deliverer, so you must help them to see the
wonders of God's mercy. You must lead them to understand, each
in his own way, that the most degraded soul who turns to Him
may be free from the bondage of sin and death. Show them that
the Holy Spirit never rests in seeking the lost, that He is
ever knocking at their hearts. Show them by illustration and
incident something of your own illuminated passion, how God
prolongs His dealings with individuals, calling them by many
different means to repent and renounce sin.
Try to call up their pity for sinners whose condition is, in
part at any rate, the consequence of some awful influences in
their lives – a bad home, drunken parents. In nearly every
country there is, if not a drink evil as we have it there,
something that corresponds to it in its dreadful and debasing
influence. You may have heard me tell the story of the little
boy who rushing into the Slum Officer's room one morning,
crying joyfully 'Captain! Captain! Father's dead; now I can be
converted!'
Many children are brought up in indifference to God and
unbelief; others are subject to cruelty or to spoiling in
childhood and lack of all guidance in youth. The influence of
home, friends and associates are all against some. The
handicap is not always drink or kindred indulgences in the
home, though, alas, it may arise from a pollution that is even
worse! But the power of a bad past – what a terrible
infliction!
Many of the Cadets, especially if brought up more or less in
association with The Army, have had great advantages. Help
them to compare their circumstances and upbringing with those
of the people whose souls we are seeking, and they will pity
them. Don't we all know what it is to feel, as we plead with
some poor, wretched wastrel, 'If I had had his parents and his
chances or no chances, I should be as bad as he is'? What
ought to be the holiest influences in life have become for
some people in the most degrading. Many are pulled down by the
very ties that should lift them up to God.
Then think of the desolation of those who have no one on earth
to love them. In some cases the memory of one who is dead may
help them. One lad told me how he was working in a warehouse
among filthy-minded companions, the stream of filth was about
him from morning till night, and sometimes he did not know
what to do. I asked him where he turned for help, and he
pulled out something wrapped in a bit of black silk – the
portrait of his mother in uniform. She was then in Heaven.
'When I feel I am slipping,' he said, 'I take it out and look
at it, and that helps me.'
You will find that Cadets are often helped in their love for
souls as they come to realise, more and more, the power that
sin formerly had in their own lives. Under the influence of
Training, the Cadet comes to look back upon his own sin as a
far more serious matter than he formerly regarded it. The
Cadet is helped when he deals with the rebellious and the
wicked if he can say to himself, 'I know the power sin once
had over me, so I can understand the power of sin over them.'
But while they pity the sinner, they must remember the
condemnation, 'that light is come into the world, and men
loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil.' Men and women are to be pitied because they drink or
because they are idolatrous, but they are to be condemned if
they do not turn to Him who offers them Salvation. Our first
duty to such people is to give them the good news of God's
love. If they refuse to turn to the living Saviour, we must
try to make them realise the condemnation they bring upon
themselves.
Sympathy with Jesus Christ
My last word on this subject today is that we must teach
and train the Cadets to associate themselves with Jesus
Christ. If they can feel true sympathy with Him they will love
the sinner.
In my own life I have always been greatly influenced by my
sympathy with God. Perhaps my circumstances have been more
favourable to that sympathy than many people's circumstances,
because I have had something to do with governing and managing
people since my boyhood, and I know the difficulties and the
conflicting and heart moving interests brought to bear in such
matters.
Bring the Cadets, one and all, into closer sympathy with Jesus
Christ. The more they love Jesus Christ, the more they will
love those for whom He suffered and died. Love for the
Shepherd will beget in us love for the sheep, especially the
lost sheep.
When you go to your Meetings, to your Lectures, to your Side
Council, kindle afresh each time your own sympathy with Jesus
Christ. Associate yourself in your own mind with Him. Lay the
hands of your soul, so to speak, upon His hands and enter into
what you are doing in sympathy with Him in what He wants to
do. Then your love for Him, and the Cadets' love for Him, will
be like the rod of Moses, which brings water out of the very
rock.
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