In 1879, the Booths returned to Gateshead and Newcastle for a Council of War. Eighteen years earlier, they had left Tyneside to face a bleak future with four delicate young children and no prospect of immediate employment. Now they returned to it, leaders of a growing, if persecuted, organization, notorious rather than famous, but with evidence everywhere appearing that their fight was likely to be victorious. Booth had sent six young girls to pioneer the North. One of them, Louisa Lock, became a soldier when she was fourteen, and an officer when she was sixteen. In Pentre, South Wales, she was sent to prison for two days’ hard labour for causing an “obstruction” by praying in a nearly empty square. She served in Sunderland and Seaham Harbour and Gateshead. In 1880, she married an officer, and in 1881, she died, not yet twenty-one, of galloping consumption. Women, such as Louisa Lock, stormed and took the trenches of Tyneside and enabled the Booths to hold a triumphant Council of War, which lasted for three days. Four thousand persons stood in Newcastle Circus to see Mrs. Booth present colours to nine of the newly-founded corps and listened while she implored them to enlist in the Army.

“The time has come,” she said, “for fire. All other agents have been tried: intellect, learning, fine buildings, wealth, respectability, numbers. The great men and the mighty men and the learned men have all tried to cast out these devils before you, and have failed. TRY THE FIRE. There are legions of the enemies of our great King. Fire on them. There are the legions of strong drink, damning millions; of uncleanness, damning millions more; of debauchery, blasphemy, theft, millions more! Charge on them, pour the red-hot shot of the artillery of heaven on them, and they will fall by thousands.”

A reporter, writing in the Northern Star, picturesquely compared the enthronement of the Bishop of Durham in the Cathedral with “the prolonged spiritual orgy which has just been held under the auspices of the Hallelujah Lasses in Newcastle and Gateshead.” The name of the reporter was William T. Stead. “The contrast between the two services is so marked that many will feel their sense of propriety outraged at the mere suggestion that they can be compared:—

“In one, every aid that art could bring to the service of religion was employed in order to inspire those present with reverence and awe. All the seductive influences of ecclesiastical art were employed without stint. There were the ‘storied windows richly dight,’ ‘the pealing ‘organ,’ and ‘the full-voiced choir,’ whose ‘service high and anthems ‘clear’ dissolved the poet into ecstasies, and brought all heaven before his eyes. All the clergy of the diocese, habited in snowy surplice and many-coloured hoods, defiled in long procession down the nave and took up positions in the choir and beneath the tower, adding thereby immensely to the beauty of the building.

In the other case, the worshippers assembled within the walls of a theatre, in the public streets, or within the unfinished walls of a public hall. The services were conducted by men and women who were destitute of any pretensions to culture. In place of the organ on which Dr. Armes discoursed sweet music in the Cathedral, the Tyneside congregations had to content themselves with the solitary strains of the Hallelujah fiddle. Rough and shock-headed processionists following banners emblazoned with the representation of the sun at noonday, and bearing the rude mystic inscription, ‘Blood and Fire,’ while Hallelujah Lasses walking backwards, precentor fashion, supplied the place of the surpliced procession of beneficed clergy. The Bishop and the Dean had as counterparts the ‘Converted Sweep’ and the ‘Hallellujah Giant.’ Only in one detail, that of taking a collection, were the two services identical.

The anthems were faultlessly performed, and, as a sacred concert, the service in the Cathedral was unequalled; but, so far as genuine hearty praise is concerned, there may be more of that in the lusty chanting of the vigorous though ungrammatical war song of The Salvation Army, which contains the grotesque couplet: