SALVATION ARMY METHODS.
By Editor
THE Boston correspondent of the Christian Union, in reporting the visit of General Booth to that city, makes the following criticism upon the methods of the army. We think the criticism is entirely just. And as the National Reform party is now courting the Salvation Army, it can very readily be seen what a worthy accession National Reform will gain when it shall have won the army. But the accession will be entirely worthy of the cause:— "The criticism which I make is not against his methods so much as against the positive way he asserts the salvation of those who go to his anxious seat to be prayed for. All the force of the meeting is directed to get sinners forward to be converted on the spot, even if they are half intoxicated. If they feel right, and submit, they are called 'saved.' They sing, 'I am saved, I am saved.' The soldiers are taught to proclaim their own salvation. If they were called new recruits in the Salvation Army, and the process of beginning were called enlisting, it might not be offensive, but the positive assumption that one has been saved during the five or ten minutes of special prayer, the scene having much that is outré and intensely exciting, is an exercise of knowledge that only Omniscience has the right to assume. I am not criticising the fact that God saves men instantly when they turn to him in penitence and love, but only the great danger there is in the positive declaration that this peculiar process, which seems to me to have large admixtures of the mechanical, transplants men into assured salvation. After listening to General Booth, I almost regretted that I remained to witness the closing scene. The army is always demonstrative whenever the preacher alludes to those who have just been saved. To parade new converts on a public platform with banners and march them through the streets as those who are 'saved' seems to me an arrogance that the Salvation Army should not encumber itself with. I recognize the power there is in their methods of appeal to the low and degraded, but the gospel inculcates modesty and humility, and converts ought not to be inflated by supercilious ideas concerning themselves, made boastful and left in danger of rushing headlong into spiritual pride, which is the most insidious foe to the Christian life."