William Booth Preaching - Actual Voice

I am glad you are enjoying yourselves. The Salvationist is a friend of Athens. Making heaven on earth is our business.

Serve the Lord with gladness is one of our favorite mottos. So I am pleased that 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 fixed in family. They eat and drink and sleep and eat and die in the same chamber.

Here is a drunken novel, void of furniture, wife of skeletons, children in rags, father now seeking the victims of his neglect. Here are the unemployed, wondering about, seeking work and finding none. Yonder are the wretched criminals, cradling crime, passing in and out of the prison all the time.

There are the daughters of shame, deceived and wronged and ruined, traveling down the dark and blind to an early grave. There are the children fighting in the gutters, going hungry in the schools, growing up to fill their parents' blades. Brought it all on themselves, do you say? Perhaps so, 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? Contempt ourselves by singing a hymn, offering a prayer, or giving a little good advice? No, ten thousand times no. We will feed them, feed them, reclaim them, employ them.

Perhaps we shall fail with many, quite likely. But our business is to help them all the same, and that in the most practical, economical, and Christlike manner. So let us hasten to the rescue, for the sake of our own people, the poor wretched themselves, the innocent children, and the savior of us all.

We do much help for the needy, and as there is nothing like the present, who in this company will lend a hand by taking up to make the list?