Surely, any one might have foreseen that unless the old forms could be altered in favour of the new regime, the leader of this warfare must submit to the old routine.

True, he might try to carry out in his Circuit, to the utmost of his power, his ideas of free and daily warfare; but, unless all who were under him in the various places which constituted a Methodist Circuit would constantly agree and co-operate, no one man could prevent the old forms from prevailing.
But William Booth was no revolutionist, and his willingness and submission to carry on the old routine, with little alteration, for four successive years surely proved that no desire for personal exaltation or mastery, but only the conquest of souls, was his guiding influence.
In those four years, spent in Brighouse and Gateshead, he tried to introduce into the churches as much as he could of the life of warfare which he considered necessary.

In one year he so far won over the officialdom of Brighouse that they desired his reappointment; whilst in Gateshead he so transformed the Circuit that before many weeks had passed the Central Chapel, which had hitherto borne the dignified but cool-sounding name of "Bethesda," was dubbed by the mechanics, who formed the bulk of the surrounding population, "The Converting Shop." To those iron workers, accustomed daily to see masses of metal suddenly changed, whilst in a red-hot state, into any desired form by the action of powerful machinery, set up for the purpose, such a name was both intelligible and expressive.
It, moreover, accorded with the new pastor's idea of the proper utilisation of any building devoted to the worship of Jesus Christ.
There ought to be felt there, he thought, that marvellous heat of Divine Love which was implied in Christ's engagement to "baptise" all His followers "with fire," and the services should above all else, be such as would ensure the immediate conversion to God of all who came under their influence.
But in Gateshead The General was to discover the most potent force that could be brought to bear upon all these questions, in the liberation of Mrs.Booth from the customary silence which Church system has almost universally imposed upon woman.

It might almost be said that the whole problem of cold formality, as against loving warmth, can be solved by woman's liberation.

True, in the ordinary state of things, the most excellent ladies of any church become its most conservative bulwarks; and, fortified, as they imagine, by a few words in one of St.Paul's Epistles, such ladies can oppose every new spiritual force as powerfully as some of them opposed him in Antioch, nineteen hundred years ago.