Purity of Heart

It is William Booth's earnest call to holiness — to a heart made clean, freed from sin, filled with love, and wholly devoted to God. Booth unfolds the path to inner cleansing and holy living, calling believers with clarity and urgency to a deeper surrender and a lasting transformation of the heart, and confronting the counterfeit religion that stops short of it.

William Booth was the founder, with his wife Catherine, of The Salvation Army, and one of the most energetic Christian leaders of the nineteenth century. His passion was the salvation and holiness of the poor and the lost, and Purity of Heart carries the same fervent, practical holiness that drove the whole Salvationist movement.

A heart cleansed from sin and filled with love for God — not merely forgiven but inwardly made pure, so that the bent toward sin is broken and the whole affection is set on God. Booth, in the holiness tradition, holds out a real cleansing of the inner life, an experience of heart holiness beyond conversion.

He teaches full salvation from the reigning power of sin and a heart cleansed and filled with love — the Wesleyan holiness emphasis of entire sanctification. Booth is less interested in theological precision than in the reality: a heart so surrendered and cleansed that it loves God wholly. He presses believers toward that cleansing as a definite work of grace to be sought and received.

He confronts a religion that is content with forgiveness while leaving the heart uncleansed — an outward profession without inward holiness. Booth warns believers to examine themselves honestly in the light of Scripture, refusing the comfortable half-measure, and calls them on to the genuine article: a pure heart, wholly given to God.

Urgent and practical, in the manner of a man who spent his life pressing the lost and the lukewarm toward God. Booth writes not to satisfy curiosity but to move the will — to bring the reader to surrender and to seek the cleansing he describes. The clarity and urgency of the Salvation Army pulpit come through on every page.

For any believer who longs to be free from the power of sin and wholly devoted to God, and who is dissatisfied with a shallow or merely outward Christianity. Booth writes for the earnest seeker after holiness, and the book calls such a reader to a deeper surrender and a real, lasting inner transformation.

At the beginning, letting Booth press the question the book opens with — whether a heart can truly be made pure — and then follow his path through surrender to cleansing. It is meant to search the reader and to lead to a definite seeking of heart holiness, so it is best read prayerfully and applied, not merely studied.