For more information on William Booth, visit Britannica.com.
William Booth
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: William Booth |
| 5min Related Video: William Booth |
| Biography: William Booth |
The English evangelist William Booth (1829-1912) founded the Salvation Army, an international Christian organization for philanthropic and evangelical work.
William Booth was born near Nottingham on April 10, 1829. As a youth, he was apprenticed to a pawnbroker, but after a conversion experience he began street preaching for a Methodist chapel. In 1849 he went to London, where he worked as a pawnbroker. Three years later, however, he became a full-time Methodist lay preacher. In 1855 he married Catherine Mumford, an intelligent and determined woman. Encouraged by her in his theological studies, Booth was ordained a minister in 1858.
Booth's theology was simple and unchanging. He drew both his beliefs and his basic practice from the model set by John Wesley a century earlier. His creed required no systematic theological learning. He held that without personal acceptance of Christ as his Savior, the sinful man would die into eternal damnation. Although the opportunity for acceptance was freely offered to all, it was certain to be ignored by the masses in the sordid and pagan slums of the new industrial towns. Thus it was necessary to reach the ignorant, the drunkard, and the criminal and offer them the chance of repentance.
Driven by this purpose, in 1861 the Booths left Methodism and in 1865 established the Christian Mission in East London. During the next 12 years Booth developed the evangelical techniques later employed in the Salvation Army. Among these were the use of secular quarters and the enlistment of converted sinners as workers. Booth was not a political or social radical; he only gradually came to accept that social uplift might have to precede conversion. Thus he slowly built a social program of food kitchens, housing, and communal organization. He wrote, however, "The Social is the bait, but it is Salvation that is the hook that lands the fish."
The conversion of the Christian Mission into the Salvation Army occurred somewhat accidentally in 1878. Booth had earlier expressed his evangelical zeal in military terms, titles, and concepts. This organizational style, not unique to his army, was in tune with the current popularity of militarism and imperialism. The army's paper, the War Cry, appeared at the end of 1879. Although the army met considerable hostility through the 1880s, by 1890 Booth had become a figure of international renown. The day-today administrative labor of the Salvation Army fell increasingly to Bramwell Booth, General Booth's oldest child and his chief of staff and successor.
Mrs. Booth died in 1890, the year in which Booth wrote, with much assistance from the reforming journalist W. T. Stead, his famous book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. In it Booth colorfully and compassionately detailed the misery of the "Submerged Tenth" and insisted that the "way out" must transform men as well as their surroundings.
Further Reading
Of the biographies of Booth, two stand out: The best is St. John Ervine, God's Soldier: General William Booth (2 vols., 1934). An earlier biography is by a friend, Harold Begbie, The Life of General William Booth: The Founder of the Salvation Army (2 vols., 1920), which is well organized chronologically but lacks clarity of detail.
Additional Sources
Barnes, Cyril J., William Booth and his army of peace, Amersham, Eng.: Hulton Educational, 1975.
Barnes, Cyril J., Words of William Booth, London: Salvationist Publishing, 1975.
Bennett, David, William Booth, Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 1986.
Coutts, Frederick Lee, Bread for my neighbour: an appreciation of the social action and influence of William Booth, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.
Robinson, Virgil E., William Booth and his Army, Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Association, 1976.
| British History: William Booth |
Booth, William (1829-1912). Revivalist and founder of the Salvation Army. Booth joined the methodists in Nottingham and in 1844 was converted. He set up a mission in London's East End in 1865, from which developed the Salvation Army. For some time Booth waged his holy war solely on the spiritual front; but experience showed that poverty was a great impediment to salvation, and in his book In Darkest England (1890) he outlined plans for social reform.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: William Booth |
Booth, William, 1829-1912, English religious leader, founder and first general of the Salvation Army, b. Nottingham. Originally a local preacher for the Wesleyan Methodists, he went (1849) to London and entered (1852) the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion Church, but in 1861 he began independent evangelistic work. In 1865, with the help of his wife, Catherine Booth, he started the East London Revival Society (soon known as the Christian Mission) in Whitechapel, London. The Christian Mission developed in 1878 into the Salvation Army. General Booth, a remarkable organizer, traveled widely, winning recognition wherever he went. In 1890 he published In Darkest England and the Way Out in collaboration with W. T. Stead. See Booth, family; Booth, Evangeline Cory.
Bibliography
See biographies by G. S. Railton (2d ed. 1912), H. Begbie (1920), St. J. Ervine (2 vol., 1934), H. C. Steele (1954), E. Bishop (1964), and R. Collier (1965); R. Hattersley, Blood and Fire (2000).
| Quotes By: William Booth |
Quotes:
"The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender."
"The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever-new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing."
"To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine."
"It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?"
"A man's labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization."
"There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large."
See more famous quotes by
William Booth
| Wikipedia: William Booth |
For other persons named William Booth, see William Booth (disambiguation).
| William Booth | |
|---|---|
 General Booth of The Salvation Army |
|
| Born | 10 April 1829 Sneinton, Nottingham, England |
| Died | 20 August 1912 (aged 83) Hadley Wood, London, England |
| Resting place | Stoke Newington, London |
William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878-1912). The Christian movement, with a quasi-military structure and government - but with no physical weaponry - founded in 1865, has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid.
Contents |
Early life
Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham, England, the only son of four surviving children born to Samuel Booth and Mary Moss.[1] His father was wealthy by the standards of the time, but during Booth's childhood, as a result of his father's bad investments, the family descended into poverty.
In 1842, Samuel Booth, who by then was bankrupt, could no longer afford his son's school fees, and 13-year-old William Booth was apprenticed to a pawn-broker. Samuel Booth died later that same year.[2]
Two years into his apprenticeship Booth was converted to 'salvation' and Methodism.[3] He then read extensively and trained himself in writing and in speech, becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Booth was encouraged to be an evangelist primarily through his best friend, Will Sansom. Sansom and Booth both began in the 1840s to preach to the poor and the "sinners" of Nottingham, and Booth would probably have remained as Sansom's partner in his new "Mission" ministry, as Sansom titled it, had Sansom not died of tuberculosis, in 1848.[4]
When his apprenticeship ended in 1848, Booth spent a year looking in vain for more suitable work than pawnbroking, which he disliked and considered ungodly.[5] In 1849, Booth reluctantly left his family and moved to London, where he found work and lodging in a pawnbroker's shop. Booth tried to continue lay preaching in London, but the small amount of preaching work that came his way frustrated him, and so he resigned as a lay preacher and took to open-air evangelising in the streets and on Kennington common.
In 1851, Booth joined the 'Reformers' (Methodist Reform Church), and on 10 April 1852, his 23rd birthday, he left pawnbroking and became a full-time preacher at their headquarters at Binfield Chapel in Clapham. William styled his preaching after the revivalist American James Caughey, who had made frequent visits to England and preached at Booth's favorite church, Broad Street Chapel. Just over a month after he started full-time preaching, on 15 May 1852, William Booth became formally engaged to Catherine Mumford. In November 1853, Booth was invited to become the Reformers' minister at Spalding, in Lincolnshire.
Early ministry
Though Booth became a prominent Methodist evangelist, he was unhappy that the annual conference of the denomination kept assigning him to a pastorate, the duties of which he had to neglect to respond to the frequent requests that he do evangelistic campaigns. At the Liverpool conference in 1861, after having spent three years at Gateshead, his request to be freed for evangelism full-time was refused yet again, and Booth resigned from the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion.
Soon he was barred from campaigning in Methodist congregations, so he became an independent evangelist. His doctrine remained much the same, though; he preached that eternal punishment was the fate of those who do not believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the necessity of repentance from sin, and the promise of holiness. He taught that this belief would manifest itself in a life of love for God and mankind. Eventually, the Booths' children became involved in the ministry.
The Christian Mission
In 1865, Booth and his wife Catherine opened The Christian Revival Society in the East End of London, where they held meetings every evening and on Sundays, to offer repentance, salvation and Christian ethics to the poorest and most needy, including alcoholics, criminals and prostitutes. The Christian Revival Society was later renamed The Christian Mission.
Booth and his followers practiced what they preached and performed self-sacrificing Christian and social work, such as opening “Food for the Million” shops (soup kitchens), not caring if they were scoffed at or derided for their Christian ministry work.
The Salvation Army
| Part of a series on The Salvation Army |
|
 |
|
|
Background |
|
|
Organization |
|
|
Persons |
|
|
Other |
|
|
Related organizations |
|
In 1878 the name of the organization was changed to The Salvation Army, modelling it in some ways after the military, with its own flag (or colours) and its own music, often with Christian words to popular and folkloric tunes sung in the pubs. He and the other soldiers in God's Army would wear the Army's own uniform, 'putting on the armour,' for meetings and ministry work. He became the "General" and his other ministers were given appropriate ranks as "officers".
Though the early years were lean ones, with the need of money to help the needy an ever growing issue, Booth and The Salvation Army persevered. In the early 1880s, operations were extended to other countries, notably the United States, France, Switzerland, Sweden and others, including to most of the countries of the British Empire: Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc.
Often the beginnings in other countries occurred through "salvationist" activities by non-officers who had emigrated. With some initial success they would contact London to 'send officers.' In other cases, like in Argentina, a non-salvationist told Booth that there were thousands of British people there who needed salvation. The four officers sent in 1890 found that those British were scattered all over the pampas. But the missionaries started ministry in Spanish and the work spread throughout the country - initially following the railroad development, since the British in charge of building the railroads were usually sympathetic to the movement.
During his lifetime, William Booth established Army work in 58 countries and colonies, travelling extensively and holding, "salvation meetings."
Booth regularly published a magazine and was the author of a number of books; he also composed several songs. His book In Darkest England and the Way Out not only became a bestseller after its 1890 release, it set the foundation for the Army's modern social welfare schemes. It compared what was considered "civilized" England with "Darkest Africa" - a land then considered poor and backward. What Booth suggested was that much of London and greater England after the Industrial Revolution was not better off in the quality of life than those in the underdeveloped world. And he proposed a strategy to apply the Christian Gospel and work ethic to the problems. The book speaks of abolishing vice and poverty by establishing homes for the homeless, farm communities where the urban poor can be trained in agriculture, training centres for prospective emigrants, homes for fallen women and released prisoners, aid for the poor, and help for drunkards. He also lays down schemes for poor men’s lawyers, banks, clinics, industrial schools and even a seaside resort. He says that if the state fails to meet its social obligations it will be the task of each Christian to step into the breach. However, Booth was not departing from his spiritual convictions to set-up a socialist or communist society or sub-class, supported by people forced to finance his plans; Booth's ultimate aim was to get people, "saved."
Booth asserts in his introduction,
I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. 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 for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It was asserted in some circles that In Darkest England was actually written by the crusading journalist, W.T. Stead, who, in his own words, acted as a "literary hack" for the General when Mrs. Booth lay dying. However, this assumption was swiftly dismissed by Stead some years later, declaring that, "The idea of Darkest England.. was the General's own. My part, of which I had no wish to speak.. was strictly subordinate throughout.[6]
In Darkest England and the Way Out was reprinted several times and lately in 2006.
Later years
Opinion of the Salvation Army and William Booth eventually changed to that of favour. In his later years, he was received in audience by kings, emperors and presidents, who were among his ardent admirers. Even the mass media began to use his title of 'General' with reverence.
In 1899, Booth suffered from blindness in both eyes, but with a short rest, was able to recover his sight. Later in 1899, he had to have his right eye removed and had a cataract in his left eye.[7]
William Booth was 83 years old when he died, in Hadley Wood, London. He was buried with his wife in the main London burial ground for 19th century non-conformist ministers and tutors, the non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. In Booth's honour, Vachel Lindsay wrote the poem, "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven".[8] Charles Ives, who had been Evangeline Booth's neighbour, set the poem to music.
Children of William and Catherine Booth
William Booth and Catherine Mumford were married on 17 June 1855[9] at Stockwell New Chapel, Surrey[10]. They had eight children:
- Bramwell Booth (8 March 1856 – 16 June 1929)
- Ballington Booth (28 July 1857 – 5 October 1940)
- Kate Booth (18 September 1858 – 9 May 1955)
- Emma Booth (8 January 1860 – 28 October 1903)
- Herbert Booth (26 August 1862 – 25 September 1926)
- Marie Booth (4 May 1864 – 5 January 1937)
- Evangeline Booth (25 December 1865 – 17 July 1950)
- Lucy Booth (28 April 1868 – 18 July 1953)
Grandchildren of William and Catherine Booth
- Catherine Bramwell-Booth, (20 July 1883 – 4 October 1987)
Notes
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 13
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 17
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 19
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 23-25
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 30
- ^ Quoted in Robert Sandall, The History of the Salvation Army, vol. III, 1883-1953, Social Reform and Welfare Work (1955) Appendix B, pp. 324-32
- ^ "Stories of Great Christians," Moody Broadcasting Network, a Moody radio play
- ^ http://www.bartleby.com/271/48.html
- ^ Sandall 1947, p. 7
- ^ Hattersley 1999, p. 73
References
- Railton, George Scott (1912), The Authoritative Life Of General William Booth, George H. Doran
- Sandall, Robert (1947), The History of the Salvation Army Vol.1 1865-78, Thomas Nelson
- Hattersley, Roy (1999), Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army, Little Brown, ISBN 0-316-85161-2
Works
- In Darkest England and The Way Out Diggory Press, ISBN 978-1846853777
- Purity of Heart Diggory Press, ISBN 978-1846853760
External links
- SalvationArmy.org.uk/heritage Biographical Data on General William Booth
- The William Booth Birthplace Museum - Nottingham
- The Authoritative Life of General William Booth at Project Gutenberg
- Works by William Booth at Project Gutenberg
- Books by William Booth
| Preceded by New creation |
General of The Salvation Army 1878–1912 |
Succeeded by Bramwell Booth |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Learn More
 | Salvation Army (evangelical and charitable organization) |
| Booth (British-American Protestant sociologists) |
| Evangeline Cory Booth (American-English-Canadian Protestant sociologist) |
 | Where did william booth live? Read answer... |
| What organization was founded by William Booth? Read answer... |
| What are william booths parents called? Read answer... |
Help us answer these
 | Who are william booth's children? |
| Is William booth still alive? |
| What were William Booth's last words? |
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
 |
 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
 |
| Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "William Booth". Read more |
Related answers
- Who is William Booth?
- What were the last words of William Booth?
- William Booth started what in 1865?
- What made william booth famous?
ADVERTISEMENT
Answer these
- How are John Booth and William Booth Related?
- What did William Booth do as a Job?
- What did william booth believe?
- Where did william booth die?
Mentioned in
- Salvation Army (evangelical and charitable organization)
- Booth (British-American Protestant sociologists)
- Evangeline Cory Booth (American-English-Canadian Protestant sociologist)
- Philip James
- William Booth Taliaferro
- salvation
- Scherzo: The See'r, for theater orchestra (Set No. 1/1 & 9/2), S. 10i & 18ii (K. 1C31/1 & K. 1C36/2) (Classical Work)
- Douglas Young
- Vachel Lindsay (American poet)
- Nottingham (city, England)
- Major Barbara (Further Reading) (play)
- Assemblies of God
- General William Booth Enters into Heaven, song for voice & piano, S. 255 (K. 6B50) (Classical Work)
- Come Back, Little Sheba (American Theater)
