The Daily Telegram

Open Air Meetings.

The Salvation Army holds approximately 312,000 open air meetings every week, with a fair average attendance of two million persons. These meetings are conducted in thirty-three languages.

In many countries it is a familiar sight, as evening draws in, to see army soldiers hurrying to take part in one of these services at an appointed rallying place. It may be the village green, or "the front" at a fashionable watering place, a slum street or a roaring up-town thoroughfare.

It may be under a feathery palm in Ceylon, or besides an Indian well, where people are coming and going with their water-pots. The soldiers may be clad in furs, and standing back to the wind, as in a Finnish town. Or the meeting may be among the bamboo huts of a Japanese village, before a public house in an Australian township, or among the wigwams of the Alaskan Redskins.

Indeed, none of these pictures are imaginary, but daily actualities. The heart warms at the thought of this continuous carrying out of the Divine command to "GO out and compel them to come in."

The object of these meetings is to publish the story of Jesus Christ and salvation, and to show how He uplifts the willing soul from all that is debasing and selfish. Many a would-be suicide has been saved by a word from one of these street meetings; many a dying man has passed away in happy assurance because of a message wafted to his ears from the Salvation Army below his window.

The local branch of the army holds its full share of these open meetings and they are conducted in a commendable way. Doubtless it sows seed at these meetings which later bring a harvest, the full extent of which never becomes public.