Preface to Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

For the present, however, it is not my business to flatter the / Salvation Army. Rather must I point out to it that it has almost as / many weaknesses as the Church of England itself. It is building up a / business organization which will compel it eventually to see that its / present staff of enthusiast-commanders shall be succeeded by a / bureaucracy of men of business who will be no better than bishops, and / perhaps a good deal more unscrupulous. That has always happened sooner / or later to great orders founded by saints; and the order founded by St / William Booth is not exempt from the same danger. It is even more / dependent than the Church on rich people who would cut off supplies at / once if it began to preach that indispensable revolt against poverty / which must also be a revolt against riches. It is hampered by a heavy / contingent of pious elders who are not really Salvationists at all, but / Evangelicals of the old school. It still, as Commissioner Howard / affirms, "sticks to Moses," which is flat nonsense at this time of day / if the Commissioner means, as I am afraid he does, that the Book of / Genesis contains a trustworthy scientific account of the origin of / species, and that the god to whom Jephthah sacrificed his daughter is / any less obviously a tribal idol than Dagon or Chemosh.

Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the Army. Like / Frederick's grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever (the / most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and though it is evident to / anyone who has ever heard General Booth and his best officers that they / would work as hard for human salvation as they do at present if they / believed that death would be the end of them individually, they and / their followers have a bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists / were heroically enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment / which will bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a / better life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent by / themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any active / person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the Salvationists / are unusually happy people. And is it not the very diagnostic of true / salvation that it shall overcome the fear of death? Now the man who has / come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change so / called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and utterly / careless life, has not overcome the fear of death at all: on the / contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on / any terms whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really saved until he / is ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap, having paid scot and / lot and something over, and let his eternal life pass on to renew its / youth in the battalions of the future.