Meeting their true needs

I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

--William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912): British Methodist preacher and founder of The Salvation Army, serving as its first General (1878–1912).

[TBC: Booth’s biblical admonition has increasingly been forgotten by the Salvation Army. Booth himself saw at the dawn of the 20th Century that by the end of this same century, much of the Church would be preaching:

• Christianity without Christ

• Forgiveness without repentance

• Salvation without regeneration

• Heaven without Hell

(Joseph Revell, "The Salvation Army Revisited," Report from the Wall, (an Internet daily devotional message sent from yosef@gulf.net), December 18, 1998, p. 2).

It certainly looks as if his insight was prophetic.]