"But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?"
- William Booth
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Illustration for 'List of Illustrations' page
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God's church is a militant host. Its warfare is with unseen forces of evil. God's people compose an army fighting to establish His kingdom in this earth.
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“A letter came to me a few years ago from a long-retired actress who had, as a youngster, been taken to see Edwin Booth play King Lear. It seems that towards the end of the play, when the mad Lear was brought face to face with his daughter Cordelia, there was a sharp pause, then – for a second that couldn’t quite be caught or measured – a startled, desperate, longing flicker of near-recognition stirred somewhere behind the old man’s eyes, and then – nothing. The entire audience rose, without thinking, to its feet. It didn’t cheer. It simply stood up. It was as though a single electrical discharge had passed from one body on the stage, instantaneously, through a thousand bodies in the auditorium. Something had been plugged into a socket; two forces had met.
This meeting is what the theater is all about; it is its greatest power . . . The theater gains its natural – and unique – effect not from the mere presence of live actors, or the happy accident of an occasional lively audience, but from existence of a live relationship between these two indispensible conspirators, signaling to one another through space.”
–Walter Kerr (1913-1996) Author and Theater Critic
From his book THE THEATER IN SPITE OF ITSELF
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Can we go too fast in saving souls? If anyone still wants a reply, let him ask the lost souls in Hell.
William Booth
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Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,” he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”—“pause us till these rebels now afoot / Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth perform at Ford’s.
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Long before Lincoln became President, “Macbeth” had been his favorite play. As a young lawyer, he carried a copy of it in his pocket. John Wilkes Booth had often played the title role. “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” Lincoln had said, days before his death, reading a speech from the play. “After being hunted like a dog . . . I am here in despair,” Booth wrote in his last diary entry. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for.”
Booth, the overactor who knew only rage and self-pity, was best known for his performance as Richard III, scheming, enraged, crippled, doomed. A horse! A horse! He performed it, as was standard on the nineteenth-century stage, using a loose seventeenth-century adaptation that cribbed from other Shakespeare plays. “All quiet—after Richard twice tries to rise and cannot,” he once scrawled on a blank page in his prompt book, across from Richard’s dying lines (borrowed from “Henry IV”): “Now let the world no longer be a stage / To feed contention in a lingering act . . . On bloody actions, the rude scene may end, / And darkness be the burier of the dead!” Long after Lincoln’s death, as one tale has it, Edwin Booth opened his brother’s trunk and found inside theatrical costumes that had belonged to John Wilkes and their father, many stitched by his mother. He tugged them out and burned them: Iago’s ruffed tunic, Mark Antony’s flowing toga, Richard’s long cloak, each by each, in the dead dark of an American night.
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