"On the first Sunday afternoon in April, 1869, we held our first 'Children's Salvation Service,' in our late Hall in the old Bethnal Green Road, and five children professed to find the Saviour."
But of all The General's revolutionary tasks this has, perhaps, proved to be the toughest. His eldest son--now General Bramwell Booth--made the children's work his earliest care, and in later years held annually Councils for all Officers engaged in it in England.
But, although God has wrought wonders amongst the children in every land, so that we have now thousands of Officers who have been won in their early years by that Junior work, the spectre of the Sunday School ever and anon rises to threaten with a peaceful death, this Divine undertaking. Only the most persistent watchfulness can prevent the narrow idea of instruction, and unbelief as to children's Salvation which is its foundation, from gaining the upper hand. It is so easy to get a thousand children drilled into pretty attention, pretty performances, pretty recitations and singing, and even into some degree of knowledge of the killing letter, but so hard to get any one child really to submit to the one great Teacher of mankind, and be saved!
Therefore we take special pleasure in dwelling upon the fact that The General's theory has been proved, on trial, to result in producing heroes and heroines, capable, almost in infancy, of daring battle for God, and becoming, before they reach their majority, thoroughly experienced and intelligent conquerors.
"Although the services are strictly for children, it is not an unusual thing to see adults sitting by the side of the little ones, and sometimes to see parent and child kneeling together seeking 'to know Him whom to know is life eternal.' One Sunday evening a woman brought her young son, who a short time previously had been detected in an act of dishonesty. During the service God's Spirit strove with both. The mother saw that she would have to give an account of her doings, as well as the boy, and so, side by side, they knelt, sought and professed to find pardon.
"A young lad who had been a source of great annoyance at our Meetings, and a dreadful swearer, a short time ago died triumphant in the faith. When lying in the London Hospital, evidently dying, he sent a request that I would tell the children that he was 'going Home'; 'but tell them I'm not afraid; and, Oh, tell them not to swear.'"