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Product Description
Blood and Fire is a brilliant biography of two great social and religious figures whose inheritance lives on to this day. William Booth (1829-1912) was one of the most extraordinary men of his age, a pawnbroker's clerk who would found the most successful religious movement of the nineteenth century--the Salvation Army. As a twenty-year-old, he developed the unshakable belief that God had ordained him to convert the world to Christianity. Convinced that both churches of Victorian England were ignoring the needs of the poor, he founded the East London Christian Mission. As the mission became the Salvation Army, it recruited thousands of members in battalions around the globe. Its membership is now in the hundreds of thousands in virtually every country.
Catherine, his wife, was in many ways even more exceptional. A chronic invalid and mother of eight children (within ten years), she inspired the social policy that was, and remains, an essential part of the Salvation Army's success. Catherine held ideas on social equality that were ahead of her time, and she encouraged the Army to accept "women's ministry" and give female officers authority over men. Her campaign against child prostitution resulted in the age of consent being raised from thirteen to sixteen. And it was Catherine who, even while dying of cancer, urged William to develop his plans for clearing the Victorian slums. Blood and Fire is a brilliant account of a fascinating period of social history.
Amazon.com Review
They preached in the streets of London accompanied by brass bands, appropriating the methods of ungodly popular entertainment to draw working-class sinners to righteousness. They founded soup kitchens and people's halls to feed the hungry and give them a place to congregate other than the tavern. William Booth (1829-1912) and his wife, Catherine (1829-90), outraged polite society with the establishment of their Christian Mission in 1865. Rechristened the Salvation Army in 1878, the organization challenged the smug Victorian status quo by insisting that sin sprang from unjust social conditions. British writer and Labour Party stalwart Roy Hattersley vividly conveys the political and religious context within which the Salvation Army operated without scanting the forceful (not to say peculiar) characters of its founders. William was authoritarian and self-righteous, yet he often deferred to intellectual, strong-minded Catherine, whose instinctive sympathy for the poor and belief in women's equality before God shaped their ministry. They were hardly warm people, yet their marital love was unshakable and absolute. The Salvation Army survived their autocratic leadership to flourish into the 21st century: "It is not necessary to believe in instant sanctification," writes Hattersley in a characteristically balanced summing-up, "to admire and applaud their work of social redemption." --Wendy Smith
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