"passionate love of truth" have fallen quite out of their
vocabulary and been replaced by "passional crime" and the like.
They assume, as far as I can gather, that people in whom passion
has a larger scope are passionless and therefore uninteresting.
Consequently they come to think of religious people as people who
are not interesting and not amusing. And so, when Barbara cuts
the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a kiss from her
lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think they
ought to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is an
elaborate mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically
rebuke me for mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed
mockery! Even the handful of mentally competent critics got into
difficulties over my demonstration of the economic deadlock in
which the Salvation Army finds itself. Some of them thought that
the Army would not have taken money from a distiller and a cannon
founder: others thought it should not have taken it: all assumed
more or less definitely that it reduced itself to absurdity or
hypocrisy by taking it. On the first point the reply of the Army
itself was prompt and conclusive. As one of its officers said,
they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad
to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully
acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow
them to collect it in the bar--sometimes even when there is a
Salvation meeting outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they
questioned the verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines
took the money, but because Barbara refused it.

On the point that the Army ought not to take such money, its
justification is obvious. It must take the money because it
cannot exist without money, and there is no other money to be