Aggressive Christianity

Catherine Booth 1880: Co-founder of the Salvation Army

Read Part 1

Some people seem to think that the Apostles laid the foundations of all the churches. They are quite mistaken. Churches sprang up where the Apostles had never been. The Apostles went to visit and organize them after they had sprung up, as the result of the work of the early laymen and women going everywhere and preaching the Word. Oh, may the Lord shower upon us in this day the same spirit! We should build churches and chapels; we should invite the people to them; but do you think it is consistent with these two commissions, and with many others, that we should rest in this, when three parts of the population utterly ignore our invitations and take no notice whatever of our buildings and of our services? They will not come to us. That is an established fact.

What is to be done? They have souls. You profess to believe that as much as I do, and that they must live forever. Where are they going? What is to be done? Jesus Christ says, 'Go after them.' When all the civil methods have failed; when the genteel invitations have failed; when one man says that he has married a wife, and another that he has bought a yoke of oxen, and another that he has bought a piece of land, then does the Master of the feast say, 'The ungrateful wretches, let them alone'? No. He says, 'Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.' 'I will have guests, and if you can't get them in by civil measures, use military measures. Go and compel them to come in.' It seems to me that we want more of this determined aggressive spirit. Those of you who are right with God this afternoon, you want more of this spirit to thrust the truth upon the attention of your fellow men.

Oh, people say, you must be very careful, very judicious. You must not thrust Christianity down people's throats. Then, I say, you will never get it down. What! Am I to wait till an unconverted, godless man wants to be saved before I try to save him? He will never want to be saved till the death rattle is in his throat. What! Am I to let my unconverted friends and acquaintances drift down quietly to damnation, and never tell them about their souls, until they say, 'If you please, I want you to preach to me'? Is this anything like the spirit of early Christianity? No. Verily we must make them look, tear the bandages off, open their eyes, make them bear it, and if they run away from you in one place, meet them in another, and let them have no peace until they submit to God and get their souls saved.

This is what Christianity ought to be doing in this land, and there are plenty of Christians to do it. Why, we might give the world such a time of it that they would get saved in very self-defence, if we were only up and doing, and determined that they should have no peace in their sins. Where is our zeal for the Lord? We talk of Old Testament saints, but I would we were all like David. Rivers of water ran down his eyes because men kept not the Law of his God. But you say, 'We cannot all hold services.' Perhaps not. Go as you like. Go as quietly and softly as the morning dew. Only do it. Don't let your relatives, and friends, and acquaintances die, and their blood be found on your hands!

I shall never forget the agony depicted on the face of a young lady who once came to see me. My heart went out to her in pity. She told me her story. She said, 'I had a proud, ungodly father, and the Lord converted me three years before his death, and, from the very day of my conversion, I felt I ought to talk to him, and plead, and pray with him about his soul, but I could not muster up courage. I kept intending to do it, and intending to do it, until he was taken ill. It was a sudden and serious illness. He lost his mind, and died unsaved,' and she said, 'I have never smiled since, and I think I never shall any more.' Don't be like that. Do it quietly, if you like; privately, if you like; but do it, and do it as if you felt the value of their souls, and as if you intended to save them, if by any possible means in your power it could be done.

Forceful Men and Women

I had been speaking in a town, in the West of England, on the subject of responsibility of Christians for the Salvation of souls. The gentleman with whom I was staying had winced a bit under the truth, and instead of taking it to heart in love, and making it the means of drawing him nearer to God, and enabling him to serve Him better, he said, 'I thought you were rather hard on us this morning.' I said, 'Did you? I should be very sorry to be harder on anybody than the Lord Jesus Christ would be.' He said, 'You can push things to extremes, you know. You were talking about seeking souls, and making sacrifices. Now, you are aware that we build the chapels and churches, and pay the ministers, and if the people won't be saved, we can't help it.' (I think he had given pretty largely to a chapel in the town.)

I said, 'It is very heartless and ungrateful of the people, I grant, but, my dear sir, you would not reason thus in any temporal matter. Suppose a plague were to break out in London, and suppose that the Board of Health were to meet and to appropriate all the hospitals and public buildings they could get to the treatment of those diseased, and suppose they were to issue proclamations to say that whoever would come to these buildings should be treated free of cost, and every care and kindness bestowed on them, and, moreover, that the treatment would certainly cure them, but, supposing the people were so blind to their own interests, so indifferent and besotted that they refused to come, and consequently, the plague was increasing and thousands dying, what would you in the provinces say? Would you say, "Well, the Board of Health have done what they could, and if the people will not go to be healed, they deserve to perish; let them alone"?

No, you would say, "It is certainly very foolish and wicked of the people, but these men are in a superior position. They understand the matter. They know and are responsible for the consequences. What in the world are they going to do? Let the whole land be depopulated? No! If the people will not come to them, they must go to the people, and force upon them the means of health, and insist that proper measures should be used for the suppression of the plague."' It needed no application. He understood it, and I believe, by the Spirit of God, he was enabled to see his mistake, to take it home, and set to work to do something for perishing souls.

You Can Do It!

Men are preoccupied, and it is for us to go and force it upon their attention. Remember, you can do it. There is some one soul that you have more influence with than any other person on earth, some soul or souls. Are you doing all you can for their Salvation? Your relatives, friends, and acquaintances are to be rescued.

Thank God! we are rescuing the poor people all over the land by thousands. There they are, to be looked at, and talked with, and questioned, people rescued from the depths of sin, degradation, and woe, saved from the worst forms of crime and infamy; and, if He can do that, He can save your genteel friends, if only you will go to them desperately and determinedly. Take them lovingly by the buttonhole, and say, 'My dear friend, I never spoke to you closely, carefully, and prayerfully about your soul.' Let them see the tears in your eyes; or, if you cannot weep, let them hear the tears in your voice, and let them realize that you feel their danger, and are in distress for them. God will give His Holy Spirit, and they will be saved.

I was going to note that both texts imply opposition, for, He adds, 'Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.' As much as if He had said, 'You will have need of My presence. Such aggressive, determined warfare as this will raise all earth and Hell against you'; and then He says to Paul, 'I will be with thee, delivering thee from the people and the Gentiles unto whom I send thee.' Why would they need this? Because the Gentiles would soon be up in arms against Him, and indeed they were.

Opposition! It is a bad sign for the Christianity of this day that it provokes so little opposition. If there were no other evidence of it being wrong, I should know it from that. When the Church and the world can jog along comfortably together, you may be sure there is something wrong. The world has not altered. Its spirit is exactly the same as it ever was, and if Christians were equally faithful and devoted to the Lord, and separated from the world, living so that their lives were a reproof to all ungodliness, the world would hate them as much as ever it did.

It is the Church that has altered, not the world. You say, 'We should be getting into endless turmoil.' Yes, 'I came not to bring peace on the earth, but a sword.' There would be uproar. Yes, and the Acts of the Apostles are full of stories of uproars. One uproar was so great that the Chief Captain had to get Paul over the shoulders of the people lest he should have been torn in pieces. 'What a commotion!' you say. Yes; and, bless God, if we had the like now we should have thousands of sinners saved.

The Dignity of Divine Love

'But', you say, 'see what a very undignified position this would bring the Gospel into.' That depends on what sort of dignity you mean. You say, 'We should always be getting into collision with the powers that be, and with the world, and what very unpleasant consequences would result.' Yes, dear friends, there always have been unpleasant consequences to the flesh, when people were following God and doing His will.

'But,' you say, 'wouldn't it be inconsistent with the dignity of the Gospel?' It depends from what standpoint you look at it. It depends upon what really constitutes the dignity of the Gospel. What does constitute the dignity of the Gospel? Is it human dignity, or is it Divine? Is it earthly, or is it Heavenly dignity? It was a very undignified thing, looked at humanly, to die on a cross between two thieves. That was the most undignified thing ever done in this world, and yet, looked at on moral and spiritual grounds, it was the grandest spectacle that ever earth or Heaven gazed upon, and methinks that the inhabitants of Heaven stood still and looked over the battlements at that glorious, illustrious Sufferer, as He hung there between Heaven and earth.

The Pharisees, I know, spat upon the humbled Sufferer, and wagged their heads and said, 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save.' Ah! but He was intent on saving others. That was the dignity of Almighty strength allying itself with human weakness, in order to raise it. It was the dignity of eternal wisdom shrouding itself in human ignorance, in order to enlighten it. It was the dignity of everlasting, unquenchable love, baring its bosom to suffer in the stead of its rebellious creature, man. Ah! it was incarnate God standing in the place of condemned, apostate man, the dignity of love, love, LOVE!

Oh, precious Saviour! save us from maligning Thy Gospel and Thy Name by clothing it with our paltry notions of earthly dignity, and forgetting the dignity that crowned Thy sacred brow as Thou didst hang upon the cross! That is the dignity for us, and it will never suffer by any gentleman here carrying the Gospel into the back slums or alleys of any town or city in which he lives. That dignity will never suffer by any employer talking lovingly to his servant maid or errand boy, and looking into his eyes with tears of sympathy and love and trying to bring his soul to Jesus.

That dignity will never suffer even though you should have to be dragged through the streets with a howling mob at your heels, like Jesus Christ, if you have gone into those streets for the souls of your fellow-men and the glory of God. Though you should be tied to a stake, as were the martyrs of old, and surrounded by laughing and taunting fiends and their howling followers, that will be a dignity that shall be crowned in Heaven, crowned with everlasting glory. If I understand it, that is the dignity of the Gospel, the dignity of love. I do not envy, I do not covet any other. I desire no other, God is my Witness, than the dignity of love.

Oh, friends, will you get this baptism of love! Then you will, like the Apostles, be willing to push your limbs into a basket, and so be let down by the wall, if need be, or suffer shipwreck, hunger, peril, nakedness, fire, or sword, or even go to the block itself, if thereby you may extend His Kingdom and win souls for whom He shed His Blood. The Lord fill us with this love and baptise us with this fire, and then the Gospel will arise and become glorious in the earth, and men will believe in us, and in it. They will feel its power, and they will go down under it by thousands, and, by the grace of God, they shall.

Catherine Booth 1880