Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army - Hardcover

A dual biography of William and Catherine Booth, the founders of The Salvation Army, chronicles the lives and accomplishments of these two nineteenth-century British social and religious reformers and discusses their remarkable influence on the social history of their era.

and Fire is a brilliant biography of two great social and religious figures whose inheritance lives on to this day.  William Booth (1829-1912) was one of the most extraordinary men of his age, a pawnbroker's clerk who would found the most successful religious movement of the nineteenth century--the Salvation Army. As a twenty-year-old, he developed the unshakable belief that God had ordained him to convert the world to Christianity.  Convinced that both churches of Victorian England were ignoring the needs of the poor, he founded the East London Christian Mission.  As the mission became the Salvation Army, it recruited thousands of members in battalions around the globe.  Its membership is now in the hundreds of thousands in virtually every country.

Catherine, his wife, was in many ways even more exceptional.  A chronic invalid and mother of eight children (within ten years), she inspired the social policy that was, and remains, an