The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-05-10
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS

his or her time every year and am go- ing to pay my share"
 This is as good a text as I want to base Salvation Army sermon on. It goes 10 the very root of the matter It's easy enough to give enough to ease ones conscience or preserve ones self-respect. but to be willing to contribute and then make a personal sacrifice by service is better.
 The story of the Salvation Army is one of the worlds strangest religious romances. It was born in the brain Of "a man and kept alive in the heart of a woman. For while William Booth is the father of the Salvation Army, it's mother is Catherine Booth He is it's hero while she is it's heroine.
 love fiction but in all the range of literature there is nothing comparable to the simple story of the courtship, mar riage and labors of the two leading characters in the drama of the Salva- tion Army. It's hero, William Booth, was the only son of a widowed and im- poverished mother, while it's heroine, in her early childhood was kept for years a shut-in on account of a spinal disease.
 Any human author looking for suitable characters for novel would have passed them both by as unpromising material, but God, the divine author, took them as he found them and breathed His Spirit into them and set them in lowly places to lift them later into higher ones; but not until they had passed through the valley of humiliation and been tested in the fire of service to man kind
 Yesterday was Mothers day and our hearts were made tender by the thought of the mothers of the world and I want to let him bear testimony to her who bore him and brought him up through bitter years of toll, poverty and sacrifice to be the outstanding religious figure ot his day and generation, until today he is known the world round as the great general"
 Of her he wrote in 1893: q had good mother. So good she has ever appeared to me that I have often said that all l knew of her life seemed striking con- tradiction of the doctrine of human de- pravity. In my youth I fully accepted that doctrine and I do not deny it now; but my patient, self-sacrificing mother always appeared to be an exception to the rule,'' In this tribute we hear the theologian speaking, now hear the low
 ing son speak T loved my mother. Fl om infancy to manhood I lived in her home. Home was not home to me with out her."
 When Catherine Mumford was F years of age an incident occurred which, seen in the light of her later year, seemed to have foreshadowed her lifes work A drunken man had-been taken in charge and was being led down the street fol lowed by a hooting crowd. She watched the scene and moved by a passionate pity for the poor wretched man, she flew to his side, put her small hand in his to show him that he was not without a friend, and marched by him to the police station in spite of the jeers of the crowd. It has been pointed out that it was lthe first open-air procession of the future mother of the Salvation Army, and II was typical in more ways than one oi the woman whose greatest incentive tc the heroic actions which crowd together in her later life was always the infinite pity and yearning tenderness for the poor, the helpless and the miserable. Her great heart always famed indignantly al the sight of any mstreatment of the so- called submerged classes,' for in hel eyes no man was ever down and out.
 
 1 This was shown constantly in her acts in her speech and breathes through al of her letters to her children when they went out in the service of the Man oi Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief )When the eldest of her four evangelist daughters, Katie, gave herself to the French mission her mother wrote hel after she had arrived in France; '- | should indeed aspire to be the bride o the Lamb and to follow Him in con. , flict for the salvation of poor, lost ant miserable man.
 | I haven't the time here to tell tho story of how Catherine Booth. the wo man whose sensitive nature shrani i from any form of publicity. overcamt her dstaste for public speaking and de
 veloped into one of the most persuasive | it were, for all women-speakers, from ths thousands of female officers ip the Sal
 vation Army to the crowds of womeI who now speak without let or hindranc'
 on every conceivable subject.
 | Mrs Booth was in many ways thu exact opposite to her husband in char
 acter and temperament. and their unioI
 has been cited to prove the truth of thu
 old adage that the happiest marriages
 are those in which the husband and thu wife are the compliment of one another Where General Booth was sanguine ant jeaser, his wife was retiring and anxious
 where he looked ahead, seeing only th'
 goal, she often turned back and con
 sidered the means and the beginnihs Where he was for immediate action sh'
 counselled caution. But in their con victions they were absolutely as one This is the teStimOnv of those who knew