For a long time, however, I failed to see how this work could be done in any organised or extensive manner.
Gradually, however, the way opened, and opened largely, as a result of our determination to make the godless crowds hear the message of Salvation.
I said, "They shall hear; we will make them hear; and if they won't hear in any other way, we will feed them, and accompany the food we give them with the message to which they so determinedly turn a deaf ear." In the very earliest days of The Army, therefore, in order to reach the people whom we could not reach by any other means, we gave the hungry wretches a meal, and then talked to them about God and eternity.
4.

Then came the gradual unfolding of our Social methods, which have been so remarkably successful.
My dear wife's heart had been particularly drawn out on behalf of the fallen outcasts of society, who, often more sinned against than sinning, appealed peculiarly to her large and tender sympathies.
More than once she found opportunity for extending help to individual cases of misfortune, obtaining homes amongst her friends for some of the children, and assisting the poor mothers to win their way back to virtue.
But it was not until the end of 1883, or thereabouts, that anything like a systematic effort in this direction was organised on their behalf.

Touched by the helpless and pitiable condition of some poor girls who had sought Salvation at the Corps at which, with her husband, she fought as a Soldier, a baker's wife, living in one of the most wretched streets in Spitalfields, took the girls, in distress and trouble, into her own home.

Before long it was crowded to its utmost capacity, and still other women were clamouring for admission.

She implored us to help her, and we engaged and opened a house as our first Rescue Home, placing it under the direction of Mrs.Bramwell Booth.
The breaking forth of the same spirit in different directions in other lands quickly followed.
At about this time our first Prison Rescue Brigade, in the Colony of Victoria, was organised by the late Colonel Barker.