I reckon this is gott abe the best offering preach I've heard.....
I am glad you are enjoying yourselves; the Salvationist is the friend of happiness, making heaven on earth is out business. “Serve the Lord with gladness’ is one of our favourite mottos.
So I am pleased if you are pleased. But amidst all your joys don’t forget the sons and daughters of misery. Do you ever visit them? Come away and let us make a call or two.
Here is a home, six in family, bathe and drink and sleep and feed and die in the same chamber.
Here is a drunkard’s hove void of furniture, wife a skeleton, children in rags, father maltreating the victims of his neglect.
Here are the unemployed wandering about seeking work and finding none.
Yonder are the wretched prisoners cradled in crime, passing in and out of the prison all the time.
There are the daughters of shame diseased and wronged and ruined, travelling down the dark incline to an early grave.
There are the children fighting in the gutters, going hungry to school, growing p to fill their parents’ places.
Brought it all on themselves do you say?
Perhaps o, but that does not excuse our assisting them!
You don’t demand a certificate of virtue before you drag some drowning creature out of the water. Nor the assurance that a man has paid his rent before you deliver him from the burning building!
But what shall we do? Content ourselves by singing a hymn, offering a prayer of giving a little good advice.
No! Ten thousand times No! We will pray for them, reclaim them, employ them. Perhaps we shall fail with many. Quite likely.
Our business is to help them all the same, and that in the most practical, economical and Christlike manner.
So let us haste to the rescue foe the sake of our own peace, the poor wretches themselves, the innocent children and the Saviour of us all.
But who will help with the means? And as there is nothing like the present who in this company will lend a hand by taking up the collection?
William Booth
-Be Strong and Courageous-
!Relle
