The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, JUNE 18, 1883.

New Zealand Times, Volume XL, Issue 6886, 18 June 1883, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY.) MONDAY, JUNE 18, 1883.

The so-called “campaign of the Salvation Army" in Wellington commenced yesterday, and drew good houses at the Princess Theatre in Tory-street. If we might judge from the performances, the “campaign” is likely to be considered a very slow affair, and will soon need something sensational to interest people generally in it. The public appearance of the Salvation Army seems, if we may judge by the experience of yesterday, to have been unduly praised and unduly censured, and in reality calculated, like the proverbial “chip in the porridge,” to do not much good and not much harm. Those who have stopped from time to time to listen to street preachers of the average stamp, or those who have been present in the small conventicles of Wales and Cornwall when revival services have been going on, must be struck with the great general resentblance of the public devotions on such occasions to those of the leaders of the “Army.” The chief difference yesterday was that, in place of the fervid but rather empty rhetoric usual at “ranters’ meetings” in the more purely British parts of the Home country, there was occasionally a variation here from seriousness and solemnity to side comments on disturbances, rough but not very coarse jokes of the description usual when a popular member of Parliament or other mob orator is on the stump. It is only due to the speakers of yesterday to say that they wore neither stupid nor irreverent in their main discourses, but somewhat commonplace and shallow. The chief evil to be feared is that, in order to draw crowded audiences continuously, they may add the meretricious attractions of a manufactured vehemence in preaching and the outward display of a foolish quasi-Jingoism to their general plan of conversion. We find nothing of this sort in the public deportment of either the great Founder of Christianity or of his disciples, when these last were describing what were to them the moat exciting events in all history — the sufferings and death of their Lord — and they wrote with an almost judicial calmness, merely chronicling the facts, and allowing them to speak for themselves. And as for Him, we find that He spoke of himself as one who “shall neither strive, nor cry, nor shall his voice be heard in the streets.” And well might they be thus reticent, for it is not noisy rhetoric, nor empty military display, which is likely to regenerate the world, but appeals that go home to the mind, the heart, and the conscience, and, best of all, the unspoken but eloquent testimony of a noble life.