Ministers everywhere were invited and welcomed to its
platforms, majors and colonels were few and far between, and the
supremacy and power of the General were things unknown . . . Care was
taken to avoid anything like proselytism; its converts were never
coerced into joining its ranks... In a word, the organization
occupied the position of an auxiliary mission and recruiting agency
for the various religious bodies.... The meetings were crowded, people
professed conversion by the score, the public liberally supplied the
means to carry on the work in their respective communities; therefore
every corps was wholly self-supporting, its officers were properly, if
not luxuriously, cared for, the local expenditure was amply provided,
and, under the supervision of the secretary, a local member, and the
officer in charge, the funds were disbursed in the towns where they
were collected, and the [265] spirit of satisfaction and confidence
was mutual all around" (pp. 4, 5).
Such was the army as the green tree. Now for the dry:--
"Those who have been daily conversant with the army's machinery are
well aware how entirely and radically the whole system has changed,
and how, from a band of devoted and disinterested workers, united in
the bonds of zeal and charity for the good of their fellows, it has
developed into a colossal and aggressive agency for the building up of
a system and a sect, bound by rules and regulations altogether
subversive of religious liberty and antagonistic to every (other?)
branch of Christian endeavour, and bound hand and foot to the will of
one supreme head and ruler.
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