LOOK UP AND HOPE: The Biography of Maud Ballington Booth

Great persons often get lost in the confusion of great controversies. Maud Ballington Booth was one such. Her biography, written so sympathetically by Susan Welty, is a must for anyone who wants to make head or tail out of the schism between the Volunteers of America and the Salvation Army. It was her husband, Ballington Booth, who was chiefly responsible for the first success and solid founding of the Salvation Army in the United States, and it was also her husband who, having been ejected from the Salvation Army, founded the Volunteers, a strictly American organization which has given the parent group some very healthy competition in their common work of redeeming lost souls in the name of Christ. Maud Ballington Booth, an Anglican clergyman's daughter, would have had enough to do just keeping up to her husband, but she had a most important additional ministry of her own. Stung to an awareness of dreadful prison conditions, she founded the Volunteer Prison League, and spent a great deal of her time in the ministry to those imprisoned, to those responsible for them, and to those lawmakers and budget operators who had created a shambles in American penology. This book is worth anyone's time as a good story, but it really should be read by those who care about the ministry to the lost, those who would hope for a redemptive policy in penology and those who have curiosity enough to want the record straight when they see two American organizations operating competitively to redeem lost men and women.