The "Times," December 27th, 1890 SIR,--In ****** use of the only evidence of the actual working of Mr.
Booth's autocratic government accessible to me, I was fully aware of the slippery nature of the ground upon which I was treading. For, as I pointed out in my first letter, "no personal habit more surely degrades the conscience and the intellect than blind and unhesitating obedience to unlimited authority." Now we have it, on Mr. Booth's own showing that every officer of his has undertaken to "obey without questioning or gainsaying the orders from headquarters." And the possible relations of such orders to honour and veracity are demonstrated not only by the judicial deliverance on Mr. Booth's affidavit in the "Eagle" case, which I have already cited; not only by Mr. Bramwell Booth's admission before Mr. Justice Lopes that he had stated what was "not quite correct" because he had "promised Mr. Stead not to divulge" the facts of the case (the "Times," November 4th, 1885); but by the following passage in Mr. Hodges's account of the reasons of his withdrawal from the Salvation Army:-,"The general and Chief did not and could not deny doing these things; the only question was this, Was it right to practise this deception? These points of difference were fully discussed between myself and the Chief of the Staff on my withdrawal, especially the Leamington incident, which was the one that finally drove me to decision. I had come to the conclusion, from the first, that they had acted as they supposed with a single eye to the good of God's cause, and had persuaded myself that the things were, as against the devil, right to be done, that as in battle one party captured and turned the enemy's own guns upon them, so, as they were fighting against the devil, it would be fair to use against him his weapons. And I wrote to this effect to the "General" .
Now, I do not wish to say anything needlessly harsh, but I ask any prudent man these questions. Could I, under these circumstances, trust any uncorroborated statement emanating from headquarters, or made by the General's order? Had I any reason to doubt the truth of Mr.
Hodges's ***** confession of the corrupting influence of Mr. Booth's system? And did it not behove me to pick my way carefully through the mass of statements before me, many of them due to people whose moral sense might, by possibility, have been as much blunted by the army discipline in the use of the weapons of the devil as Mr. Hodges affirms that his was?
Therefore, in my third letter, I commenced my illustrations of the practical working of Boothism with the evidence of Mr. Redstone, fortified and supplemented by that of a non-Salvationist, Dr.
