The Girl Who Lived The Meaning of Her Name

Many a passerby on the crowded London street paused to glance at the earnest, thoughtful face of a slender, golden-haired flower girl and to buy a nosegay from her basket. When her stock was sold this girl, as fair and fragile as one of her own flowers, picked her way through the throng. She presently disappeared into one of the dirty alleyways, where only the poorest of Londoners lived.

Children ran to meet her and rough men touched their caps as she passed. The sick woman whose wretched room she entered fell asleep peacefully after receiving a bowl of soup from her hands and a cheery word.

For weeks this sweet-faced young girl, who sold flowers or worked at making matches, had been winning the hearts of the poor, discouraged people of this district. She tended their babies and prayed with the lonely old women. These people felt that they had found a friend who was sorry for them and who was always ready to give them aid. They called her the “White Angel.”

One day she told these people that she was a Salvation Army lassie. The Army was hated in this district because it was trying to close the saloons; only a few months earlier its preachers had been stoned in the streets. The “White Angel,” herself, had been warned by the police that it would be dangerous for her to speak in this part of London. Yet so beloved and respected had she become that she felt perfectly safe. Because of her good work, the people in this poverty-stricken and wicked district were soon attending the meetings of the Army.

The girl who dared to go into the very worst part of London to live the life of its poor people that she might better know how to help them was Evangeline Booth. In later years she became the Commander-in-chief of the Salvation Army in the United States.

Evangeline Booth’s father, William Booth, had been apprenticed as a boy to a pawnbroker. He was so touched by the poverty and wickedness around him that he put his whole soul into helping others to lead better lives. The Mission, that he established in London after many struggles, became in time the Salvation Army. For years, William Booth, General of the Army, toiled against odds of every kind.

The thinking world now has respect and admiration for the splendid work that the Salvation Army carries on. In those days, however, the street preachers of the Army were as likely to be showered with stones and bricks as to be sneered and ridiculed. The rougher people disliked the Army because it was fighting drink and wickedness. Other people could not see that the drum and tambourine and simple prayers might help to turn a man’s heart to God as readily as could organ music and learned sermons.

It was into the home of the founder of this once despised organization, at Hackney, a suburb of London, that a seventh child, Evangeline Booth, was born, December 1865. There was a loving welcome for the little girl, though she had come into a home where both mother and father believed that their family must be second to the work that they were doing for the world.

Little Evangeline and her sisters heard so much of their father’s work that even their favorite game was playing prayer meeting with their battered dolls. She and the others had very few toys, because their parents thought that the money should be spent for the poor.

It was a very busy home in which Eva, as her father preferred to call her, grew up. The bell was always ringing. Messengers were coming and going. In one room her father’s deep voice might be heard planning his work. In another room her mother was busy writing for the Cause. The younger children murmured their lessons in a third room, and in a fourth, one of the older girls practiced on the piano.

The General would often stop in the midst of his work for little chats with his children. He would take Eva, for whom he always had a specially deep love and tenderness, upon his knee and ask her about her puppies or kittens. Once when Eva felt very sad over the death of her pet dog, her father took her to the city and spent the whole day telling her stories and comforting her.

At an early age Eva learned that she should pick up her books and toys for, above everything else except sin, her father hated disorder. Orderliness was a useful habit to be acquired by one who was later to have charge of the affairs of a great organization.

Though Eva’s mother was often too busy to spend much time with her, she heard her daughter’s prayers and urged her to study so that she could help the weak, the poor, the ignorant, and the wicked. Mrs. Booth often reminded Eva to carry out in her life the meaning of her beautiful name, Evangeline, “bringing glad tidings.”

Evangeline Booth began her work of “bringing glad tidings” when she was very young. She had inherited her father’s gift of eloquence as well as his fearlessness and love of work. At fifteen years of age she spoke very beautifully at a meeting near London. When she was seventeen years old she was made an officer in the Army and began the work in the slums which won her the title of “White Angel.”

After ably filling various positions in the Salvation Army in Great Britain, Evangeline Booth was made Commander of the Army in Canada. At the time of the Gold Rush in 1898, she sent Salvation Army workers to the Klondike. In 1904 she was made Commander-in-chief of the Salvation Army in the United States. Besides her duties as Commander she has composed words and music for the Army’s songs and has written articles for the Army publications and other magazines.

In addition to its religious work the Salvation Army maintains homes, hospitals, clinics, and day nurseries; it finds employment for men and women out of work; and it sends mothers and children on summer outings. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving pennies dropped into the big red Salvation Army kettles provide dinners for thousands of the poor. In a single year the Army in the United States made 175,698 children happy with Christmas toys.

During the World War the pies and doughnuts served by the Salvation Army lassies cheered thousands of lonely soldiers, and many a mother has the Salvation Army to thank for her boy’s last message.

Evangeline Booth was for almost twenty years Commander-in-chief of this great organization in the United States. She believes, as her father did before her, that the first step in influencing a man to lead a better life is to make him feel that you really care whether he sinks or swims. Her courageous, selfless life shows that she does care.