Aggressive Christianity: Practical Sermons

Our attention was first called to this book by Rev. Daniel Steele. D., and after a careful, and, to us, profitable reading, -vre yielded readily to his persuasion to give it to the American Churches, being assured that its practical, burning truths, must arouse all to a clearer apprehension of their duty and privilege.

These sermons are a marvel of direct, earnest appeal to the hearts of all who seek to know the way of the Lord more perfectly. No one can read them without being profoundly stirred, and scripturally enlightened. They are suited to arouse the dormant energies of all classes to a better and more useful life.

The Introduction, by Dr. Steele, sets forth in earnest words the religious character of the author, and the excellencies of these sermons. We give them to the public with the prayer that their perusal may kindle a time of revival in all the land by stirring up the people to seek the pentecostal baptism.

- McDOXALD & GILL

The addresses contained in this little volume were delivered during a series of services at the West End of London, in the summer of 1880. That they were used then of the Lord I had abundant evidence, and on that account I have consented to their reproduction in this form, hoping that He may still speak through them to many souls.

I only regret that pressing public duties have prevented the shorthand writer’s notes being revised as thoroughly as I could have wished, especially as they are reports of what were themselves largely unpremeditated utterances.

This volume is reprinted in America at my oft-repeated suggestion- TTlien the reader lias finished these sermons lie will not ask why I have urged the publication of an American edition. The sermons will have spoken for themselves. To induce the Christian public to read this book, a few words of information respecting its gifted author, her excellencies as a preacher, and the wonderful work in which she is engaged, will be our only argument.

Mrs. Catherine Booth is the wife of Rev. William Booth, formerly a Primitive Methodist preacher, but now the Commander-in-Chief of the Salvation Army. Convert at fifteen, her piety till several years aftr her marriage was like a shaded lamp, shining only upon the narrow circle of the parsonage and parish. She says: was one of the most timid and bashful disciples the Lord Jesns ever saved.” For ten years the daily battle of her life was with the duty of giving public testimony with her lips to the power of Christ to save. Her victory at last, and her rf markable call to preach, when the mother of four children under five years of age, and the spiritual power of her ministry, are thrillingly detailed in the sermon on “Witnessing for Christ.” She has been a preacher twenty-three years, and has brought up nine children to preach the Gospel.

My first knowledge of Mrs. Booth was obtained in 1880, from a letter of a strait-laced Presbyterian doctor of divinity, published in one of the organs of that denomination in New York. He had listened to all the celebrities in London, not excepting Spurgeon and Parker, but had heard no speaker who had moved him so deeply as a woman preaching in a hall in the West End of London. The woman was Mrs. Booth. This confession by a minister who would have been subjected to ecclesiastical censure if he had introduced a woman into his own pulpit, so excited my interest that I began to inquire about this new light which had arisen upon England, and to wonder whether the printing press would not soon reflect its rays upon our western world. I could not wait for an American reprint, but immediately sent for the volumes of her sermons. Having feasted upon them for several months, I am constrained to invite my fellow-Christians in America to the banquet. The volume entitled ^’ Godliness “is not on the table but is in course of preparation by McDonald & Gill, and will be eagerly sought for by all who have tasted of “Aggressive Christianity.”

One of the bishops of the Church of England has recently issued a letter to the clergy of his diocese, urging them, if they would be aroused and stimulated to go out and compel the unchurched and perishing masses to come to the gospel feast, to study the discourses of Mrs. Booth. Here they would find inspiration and incentives to this long-neglected work.

The relation of Mrs. Booth to the Salvation Army may lead some to suppose that her sermons are only frqthy rantings addressed to vicious and illiterate crowds, ‘the unwashed mob” of the metropolis of England. This is a great mistake. While General Booth was preaching in Mile End, letting down the Gospel plummet to sound the depths of the slums in eastern London,’ his wife was gathering the cultured and aristocratic class in the western part of the city, attracting such intellects as Erances Power Cobbe, the admirer and correspondent of Theodore Parker. This Unitarian lady, whose fame as a Uterateur has reached all parts of the English-speaking world, says of Mrs. Booth’s preaching: “The combination of fervent zeal with practical good sense, in her extempore discourses, must be admired even by those who differ most widely from her views.”

It has beea truthfully said that woman excels in insight, in her power of intellectual penetration, in the instantaneous, intuitive discernment of truth, like that of St. John, and that the masculine mind is superior in the discursive, or dialectic faculty, in the Pauline ability to forge and weld together the successive links of a chain of reasoning. Mrs. Booth combines both these qualities. She is Pauline and Johannean in the cast of her mind. He will be happily disappointed who opens this volume expecting to find only what Eenan sneeringly styles — when he characterizes the resurrection message of Mary Magdalene — “the hallucination of an excited woman’s imagination.” The reader must look elsewhere for the gospel of gush. In these sermons there is no incoherency, no rhapsody, no rhodomontade, but sound theology in consecutive propositions set forth in natural and logical sequence according to the laws of thought, the whole delivered with Divine unction, a river of truth set on fire by the Holy Ghost, bearing down or burning up everything before it. One element of her power is her plain, stout, terse Saxon speech, not slang, but the language of the home, the shop, and the street. Her sermons are theology in homespun. She eschews a scholastic form of theology in buckram and broadcloth.

This volume is rightly named. For two reasons the subject of the first sermon may well be applied to the entire book. First, the preacher insists that the Gospel, when it enters the heart, should be aggressive till it conquers the last lurking foe, through the power of the Holy Spirit wholly sanctifying it by an instantaneous finishing stroke given to original sin, as taught by John Wesley. This is a cardinal doctrine of the Salvation Army, and the secret of its conquering power. A meeting specially for the promotion of this experience is held weekly in every one of their barracks. In the second place, the Gospel is to be aggressive till it subdues the whole world to Jesus, its rightful King. The mighty faith of Mrs. Booth grasps this glorious consummation, as within the reach of the present generation of believers, if they yield themselves fully to the impulses of the Holy Spirit. She is no gloomy pessimist, bewailing the decay of Christianity and dishonoring the dispensation of the Paraclete by postponing the world’s conversion till after Jesus shall descend from Heaven, and in person set up a visible kingdom on the earth. These sermons are a healthful antidote to this paralyzing error, and a mighty stimulus to missionary activity. Christians are exhorted to a grand evangelistic assault upon whole ‘communities, imposing the Gospel upon them. While I am writing, detachments of the Salvation Army are attacking all the principal towns in

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