THE MARÉCHALE (continued 3)

She steadily refused to believe that nothing could be done for the morale of Frenchmen, and her faith in the innate chivalry of the people was amply justified. The respect with which she was heard was a tribute not only to the personal magnetism of a consecrated life, but to the Christian ideal of chastity. She was often told by journalists that any one else, man or woman, daring to utter half the home truths to which she gave expression would have been hissed out of the town. Explain it as one will, when she pleaded the sacred cause of womanhood, men applauded to their own hurt. "Gentlemen," she would exclaim, "I am not French, but I love your nation. I have made your country mine, and I realise what France might be but for the worm which gnaws at the root of your national life. It makes me shudder to think—it makes me literally sick to see—how many thousands of my sisters, and your sisters, in your beautiful city are ministers of vice. So many, your policemen tell me, under twenty, so many under seventeen, so many under fifteen, and there are even those known to the police who are not in their teens. Gentlemen, they do not sin alone, for we are all solidaires. They are like your own girls, your wives, your sweet little daughters. They have hearts, they have brains, they are intelligent, they would make beautiful mothers, our comrades in life's journey, helping us and sharing our burdens. And, alas, what have you made of them? Any nation which can look at that going on in its cities day by day and night by night, without a word, without a protest—which can see this splendid asset, woman, who should bear its sons and daughters, sacrificed and sold to vice, disease, and early death,—that nation is on the decline. Do not tell me that a man worthy of the name can be silent in face of these stupendous facts. Such a man is not a Frenchman.

"I am told that things have always been so, and will always be so. I hear it said on every hand that this vice is a necessity. That some women—that the daughters of the poor—should be sacrificed is regarded as inevitable. Well, then, gentlemen, as you say it is for the public utility, follow your reasoning to its own logical conclusion, be just to these poor creatures; do not despise them, do not call them lost, fallen, prostitutes; be honest and acknowledge them; allow them to stand at least on the same level as our soldiers who sacrifice themselves for their country. Far from being ashamed of them, honour them for their service to our sons and our nation.

"But you say 'it is only une fille,' and one of your senators has publicly said that 'we are come to a fine pass if an honest man cannot buy himself une bonne fortune.' Only a fille! Your mothers were once only filles, your wives were only filles, and what are your own daughters? Wherein lies the difference?

"An honest man! I am not a nun; I am not a man-hater stalking through the world. I revere man. He is half a god. Look at his works in every domain—the king of creation, given that wonderful command to subdue and rule, having everything under his feet. When he rises to his destiny, and becomes a co-worker with God, and puts his life and example—that wonderful miracle called influence—on the side of righteousness, he rises to the sublime. The sum of happiness, of pure joy and peace, that one good man can bring to the little group at home, and then to the community, to the city, to the world, cannot be estimated. And the sum of misery, the curse, the blight that one man can bring to a woman, to children, to every one he touches—that, too, cannot be estimated. An honest man! He does not even stop where the cows and horses do. He goes a thousand miles beneath them! And yet the indulgence of the passions is no more a necessity than the drinking of alcohol is a necessity for an infant of a year old. It is society that awakens those evil desires, and they unfold themselves under the influence of a baneful education.

"Gentlemen, you say that a bad woman is worse than a bad man. Have you ever reflected that the wrongs done to her are far deeper? Have you realised that her make-up is a thousand times more delicate and complex than yours, and that as a consequence this sin makes shorter work of her? Her despair is blacker and she is reckless. You take from her the hope of ever having a little home of her own, of ever having a real husband, of ever hearing herself called mother. You have done that before she can realise what you have done. She does not wait, does not estimate. The realisation comes to her later on in life. And when it comes, is it any wonder that she flies to drink and becomes a demon? Would not I? Would not you?

"Say all that you please against woman. Reckon up the sins on your side and on hers. Still your page is black as ink compared with hers. Think of the generous, the absolute, the totally blind ways she loves.

'Woman's heart runs down to love

As rivers run to seas.'

"You have your life, your work, your amusements; but love is her whole existence. She is created in that way. That makes your sin in deceiving a trusting heart infinitely greater.

"You may go and have a good marriage afterwards, and be proud of your charming wife's sweet looks, but does not the vision of another, a pale face sometimes flit across your mind? And when you look at your little cot, do you not see another baby face—another little life you have never owned, of which you are the author, and which is equally yours before God? A woman's heart has been broken, and there will be retribution."

While the Maréchale stood alone, pleading as a woman the cause of woman, her audiences of educated Frenchmen were sometimes so deeply stirred and convicted that they would rock and sob under the power of emotion; and when they rose at the end to sing a hymn that she wrote as a young girl—a hymn which has been translated into many languages—

Ote tous mes péchés!

Ote tous mes péchés!

Agneau de Dieu, je viens à toi,

Ote tous mes péchés,

the words and music would sweep over the audience like a wave, sending many away with consciences tortured and faces bathed in tears.

One morning, after such a meeting, there was a ring at the Maréchale's door, and a lady was ushered into her presence. Coming forward without a word, she took the Maréchale's face between her hands, and warmly embraced her in the French fashion by kissing both her cheeks. The Maréchale inquired what was the meaning of this sweet affection.

"Oh!" said the stranger, "you have restored to me my husband. He was listening to you last night, and when he came home he fell at my feet and begged me to pardon him, vowing that he would never again be untrue to me."

That was but one of the many fruits of these addresses.

Sometimes the Maréchale would read to élite audiences a letter which a man of high social standing wrote to a charming young girl whom he ought to have made his wife. Having met her at Carnival, he awoke in her heart an adoring love, deceived her with a promise of marriage, put a ring on her finger, and after three years abandoned her and her baby boy. The Maréchale took the letter to an eminent jurist and senator, who confessed that for cold-blooded cruelty he had never seen anything to equal it; but he sorrowfully added—such are the laws of Christian lands—that nothing could be done to right the wrong. The letter ran as follows—

"LITTLE MARIE,

"Once again I must ask pardon for all the harm I have done you. I hope, however, that you will be strong in trouble, stronger than you have been up to the present. This will be a very great consolation to me. I owe many thanks for the resolutions that the good little Marie made yesterday, in spite of her heart and all her feelings. Believe that I shall never forget it, and that it cost me much before deciding to break your ideal—but, as I told you, I prefer to be sincere. As long as my heart was free from other passion I always considered you as the best friend I possessed. If I was not completely happy, it was that living without love was not to live—but you, poor little Marie, you suffered!

"You are worth a hundred times more than I, and precisely on account of that we could not understand each other. You who are so good—too good—permeated with the most delicate sentiments, you could not conquer an ambitious man, for I am very ambitious.

"Whilst you dreamed of a simple, quiet life with me, you must understand that violent passions, riches, and a luxurious life are for me essential. In a word, our ideals are completely different, and it is a divorce of souls which I have accomplished in leaving you. Fate made us meet, and fate separates us. Don't have any ill-feeling towards me. My dream now is to create for myself quite a new life made up of goodness, of love, and above all faithfulness in a serious affection.

"I sacrifice you, it is true, but if it were otherwise, think of the torture you would have inflicted on me. Is it not better to separate, each of us keeping a good memory of what made our union? Think also how my life is insupportable in this muddle now that I love truly.

"You are good, Marie; be courageous now. The sacrifice that I ask of you is enormous, I know, but do it for love of me, and I will be eternally obliged to you.

"You will put all your tenderness in the little Gustave, whom I shall never forget, and above all remember that he who loves well chastises well. Au revoir—au revoir!

"Once again pardon me, and don't suffer too much by your exile. My only hope is that Gustave will recompense you largely for all the suffering you have endured, so little merited during these long years.

"I remain,

"Your devoted——."

Marie was human, and when the marriage day drew near there was a fierce flaming-up of resentment in her young heart. She thought of making a scene at the church and spoiling the bridegroom's joy. Her brother fanned her burning sense of wrong, and promised to back her up if she would seek revenge. But the Maréchale pleaded with her, the love of the Crucified constrained her, and on the morning of the wedding she wrote the following pathetic little note: "He is to be married to-day. The wedding bells are ringing.... It is all over, dear Maréchale, and I am on my knees in my little room. All is well; the peace of Christ is in my heart, and I have the victory." This is no romance, but a bit of real life. Which of us would have done as little Marie did? She did not know it, but she was worthy that morning of the ministry of angels—the shining ones who have never sinned and never suffered.

Sometimes the Maréchale would tell her audience a story to prove what wells of love there still are in the hearts of the most abandoned. During a three months' campaign at Lyons, resulting in one of the most remarkable revivals in which she ever took part, she was giving a midnight supper. Her officers had gone to the most notorious houses and left a card containing the words: "A lady who is devoted to the cause of women desires to speak to them on subjects which deeply interest them, in —— Hall, at twelve to-night. Supper, music and singing."

The city had been moved, and the rich demonstrated their sympathy with this effort. Having had frequent experiences of the risks attending midnight gatherings, the Maréchale enlisted the interest of the police, who on this occasion gave her all possible assistance.

Late in the evening the table was covered with damask cloths and adorned with flowers. A supper of roast beef, vegetables, fruit and black coffee was prepared. Towards midnight the piano began to be played, that those who entered the hall might be welcomed with cheerful music.

Some girls came in laughing, and quickly went out again, evidently thinking there must be some deception. They did not believe that banquets were spread for nothing. Sometimes it was very difficult to convince them that the thing was not a farce.

Presently a horrible old hag appeared—it would be difficult to imagine a more ugly, repulsive woman. Coming up to the Maréchale she said—

"You are the Holy Virgin. I know it. Oui, vous êtes la Sainte Vierge, je le sais."

The Maréchale did not know what to say, so much was she taken aback.

"You are the Holy Virgin," the old woman repeated.

"Come along and have a talk with me," said the Maréchale, "and take supper. I am delighted to see you."

The woman laughed. "No, no, no, it isn't me that you want—Ce n'est pas moi qu'il vous faut."

"Yes, it is you. I am happy, believe me I am so happy, to see you. It is you whom I want. Do sit down."

At last, with great difficulty, she was persuaded to be seated. But she stayed only a minute. The Maréchale turned to speak to somebody, and the old woman darted out of the hall. She was gone like a flash.

"We won't see her again, Maréchale," said one of the officers.

The Maréchale began to blame herself. Why did she not inspire the poor creature with confidence? Why could one not make her feel at rest? Why had she run away? She had seemed to suspect something. It was a sore disappointment.

After some waiting, the girls began to come, and the tables filled up, but every time the door opened the Maréchale turned her eye towards it in the hope of seeing her old woman return. A gloom had been cast over her spirit because that woman had gone out, not believing that she was welcome, thinking she was too old and too ugly.

The beautiful grace, "Nous Te benissons," was sung, prayer was offered, and sweet music filled the air while the plates were handed round. Some of the guests were pretty and some ugly, some young and some old, some clad in rags and some dressed in the height of fashion. Some poor famished creatures asked for a plate of meat four or five times, while others, having already supped, merely touched a little fruit with their dainty fingers and sipped a cup of black coffee.

The supper was nearly ended, and the Maréchale was preparing to speak, when the door burst open, and in came our old woman, with a pretty young girl, fair as a lily, on one arm, and a dark one, equally young and beautiful, on the other. Up she came to the "Holy Virgin," with her dear old face radiant.

"Voilà! I have gone and found them. It's these that you want! For me it is too late, but show them the other side of the medal."

The Maréchale could not speak. Her eyes filled with tears. The words cut her through. The woman did not know what an act she had done, nor what an unforgettable phrase—le revers de la médaille—she had used.

"I have spent a long time in seeking them," she said. "I am pleased—Je suis contente."

"And I, too, am happy," said the Maréchale, "but especially because you have come."

"Moi!! for me it is finished. For me it is too late. But these—they are young, they are pretty, they have life before them. It is these that you want!"

The three sat down, the Maréchale taking the old woman next to her. And she never served a cup of coffee with such pleasure in her life.

In after years she would sometimes tell the story of that old woman on a Sunday morning to an English congregation, and then ask the searching question, "Which of you has ever spent two hours day or night seeking for a lost soul as she did?"

CHAPTER XI

THE PRODIGAL SON

Baron X, the eldest son of the Baron of that name, was born at Bordeaux, and brought up in a family of strict Catholic traditions. He studied at the Collêge de Tivoli and the Lycée, but he cared for little except sport and pleasure. After he had wasted much of his father's substance in riotous living, he was informed that his allowance would be entirely cut off unless he went abroad for a time. Leaving home in disgrace, he sailed for New York, and was beginning to taste the bitterness of exile, when, chancing one day to enter a big restaurant, he was astonished to meet his cousin, the Viscount of X., who, having inherited a fortune of two million francs, was making haste to squander it. Falling upon each other's necks, they at once became companions in pleasure. Giving themselves up to all kinds of insanity, they spent immense sums in a few months.

Baron X was afraid to give himself a single moment of reflection on the enormity of his errors. He was inwardly miserable, and found that everybody else who was pursuing pleasure was as unhappy as himself. One night, at a dance in Montreal, he said to the queen of the ball, admired by everybody for her beauty and charm—

"Would that I could find out how to enjoy myself again!"

She answered, "If I seem to be gay, I have no reason for being so. Oh, how I suffer!"

The young man felt that existence became more and more mechanical, the days succeeding one another in an endless monotony of unsatisfying amusements. He seemed to be living in a bad dream.

After a while he returned to France, and one evening he was sitting, sad at heart, on the balcony of the Café de la Paix, wondering to what place of pleasure he should turn his steps, when some Salvationist girls came to offer their journal to the customers. They were greeted with the usual pleasantries. Baron X asked the waiter if he knew who these people were.

"Oh, yes, Monsieur, they are the Salutistes, and if you want to have a good laugh, you have only to go to the Rue Auber, which is quite near by; they have a hall there where you could spend a good evening."

His curiosity awakened, Baron X went to the place indicated, taking a fille de joie with him. The fair-haired young man and his companion sat at the bottom of the hall laughing. That evening there were "testimonies," which somehow arrested Baron X's attention. He could not help asking himself how these young people seemed so happy. Then a young officer read the words, "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord," and delivered an address which was not correct in language, but extremely incisive. Baron X said to himself, "He knows my history, and speaks to me." As he went out, he bought some publications which were exposed for sale at the door, and spent the night in reading them. He came next evening alone, and a great spiritual conflict began. He continued to come, and one night remained behind, being in an agony of soul. Sobbing aloud, he confessed that he had led a wild and wicked life, dishonoured his name, and broken his mother's heart. At one o'clock in the morning he gave himself to God.

The Maréchale saw that he was afraid of himself in Paris, and opened her doors to him. For six months he lived partly at her house and partly at the headquarters in the Rue Auber. She soon came to know him through and through, and was struck by his simplicity and absolute sincerity. He had broken completely with the past, and never had one arrière pensée. He was ready for any sacrifice and for the humblest service.

One day a police agent came to tell the Maréchale that she had somebody living in her house and wearing the uniform of the Armée de Salut, who was passing himself off as the son of Baron X. She called Baron X, and, while the two men stared at each other, said, "This is the son of Baron X." The official apologised and withdrew.

Baron X had written to tell his parents of his conversion, but received no answer. After six months the Maréchale had to begin a tournée at Bordeaux, and told Baron X that she would seize the opportunity to go and visit his parents. He was overjoyed. He hoped for much, and said he would pray.

When the Maréchale, clad in uniform, drew near to the gates of the Baron's château, a complete stranger stopped her and exclaimed, "My poor child, what are you going to do in that house?" She only smiled and walked on, but the question came back to her mind afterwards.

Ringing the bell, she was shown into a luxurious room, and presently the Baron, the Baroness, and their daughter appeared. She was received as stiffly as if she had been the representative of the Queen, and found it hard to begin. Making an effort, she said they had probably learned from their son that a wonderful change had taken place in his life. She was happy to be able to confirm it. For six months she and her officers had witnessed his life, and had noticed nothing in word or look or act inconsistent with this marvellous change.

There was no answer. The parents and daughter simply stared at their visitor. She continued—

"I know that his life has been bad, but I thought that you would be glad to hear of his conversion."

Then the Baroness could no longer contain herself. A torrent of words fell from her lips. She depicted the scandalous life of her son, who had been a real prodigal in every sense of the word, gambling away their wealth, bringing his mistress into their house, and disgracing their name.

"But," said the Maréchale, "that was before his change. Do not bring up what he once was. Think of what he is now. He has been living among my children, and I can trust him to go in and out with them. I know something of real conversions, and I think I can judge. I assure you that he has become a new man, with new desires, new aspirations, a new nature."

These assurances only led to another realistic description of his sins.

"But," pleaded the Maréchale, "that was when he was Saul; now he is Paul."

They stared and did not comprehend the meaning of her words.

"Let him come back to the Catholic Church," said the Baron. That his son should profess to have been saved outside the holy Mother Church was evidently a last blow to his pride.

"That is surely a secondary matter," said the Maréchale. "Considering what a sinner he has been, you should not mind by whom the change has come. He has been converted in the Armée du Salut, but there is only one God and one Saviour. Catholic and Protestant are alike if they have no life."

But the Baroness drew herself up in her beautiful robe, and said—

"Let him come back to the Catholic Church, or he will never receive another sou from us."

The Maréchale saw that it was time to end the interview.

"Very well, Baroness," she said, rising, "I will be your son's mother. I will buy your son clothes and boots."

With that she left their house disappointed and weary, having spent hours under their roof pleading their son's cause, but they had never offered her so much as a cup of tea.

On her return to Paris, she called Baron X. His face fell when she began to speak. She bade him be brave, described to him her interview with his people, and ended by saying, "I will be a mother to you, and you shall never lack for anything."

He worked on with her in Paris for some months, and then he received a telegram, "Come quickly, father dying." The Maréchale rushed him off, and he afterwards gave her an account of his eventful journey.

When he got home, he found the house silent, every sound muffled without and within.

"Am I too late?" he asked.

"No, hush! He has been asking for you all the time. Come quickly."

Upstairs he went to his father's room. Entering, he saw two thin white hands on the coverlet, and heard a voice—

"Is it my son?"

"Yes, father!"

With one bound he was at the bed-side, and fell on his knees. With breath coming thick and fast, his father said faintly—

"Oh, my son, your religion is better than mine. Forgive your old father for not forgiving you."

Holding his hand, his son spoke to him of the Saviour, and sang to him some of the choruses he had learned in the Army. Father and son were a thousand miles away from Catholicism and Protestantism. They were simply in the presence of the Saviour. With words of salvation in his ears, and filial arms around him, the old Baron passed away.

Himself now Baron X, he came into his fortune. However bad an eldest son has been, he cannot, by French law, be disinherited.

For the next four years Baron X was an officer in the Armée du Salut. In Paris and Nîmes, England and Belgium he worked with ardour for the salvation of souls. He was with the Maréchale in her Brussels campaign.[1]

[1] Described in chap. xiii.

He married Mlle. Babut, the daughter of the well-known pastor in Nîmes. As a girl she had been brilliantly clever, but very wilful, closing her heart to all who sought to influence her for good. When the Maréchale came to Nîmes she went, like everybody else, to the meetings, taking with her girl friends whom she excited to mock and laugh. But a strange power seized her. In vain she tried to escape by ridiculing what she heard. "One evening," to use her own words, "the Maréchale—directed by God—turned her eyes full on me and said, 'Young woman, you have not the right to waste your life.' Clear, pointed, cutting like a sword, this truth penetrated me, and with it the conviction, 'I ought to yield to God here and now.'" Three months later she was in the Training Home in Paris.

The Baron X and his wife afterwards became missionaries in Madagascar. They gave themselves heart and soul to the work. When Baron X's health began to fail, they returned home, and he continued to labour for Christ as long as he had any strength left. His end came in 1911. Pastor Babut said he had been attending death-beds for fifty years, but had never seen anything so beautiful as the Baron's latter end.

"Courage," said some one to the dying man.

"Courage? I do not need it when heaven is open to me."

"Do you see the Lord Jesus near you?"

"But I am with Him!"

"God has used you to work for Him."

"All I have done counts for nothing, only the immense grace and love of God remain."

CHAPTER XII

SO GREAT FAITH

It was mid-winter, and the ground was covered with snow. There was no little anxiety at the Villette. Forty hungry mouths had to be filled at the École Militaire, and there was nothing for dinner. The simple fact was that the cash-box was empty, and it was difficult not to have a heavy heart. But the maxim of a Salutiste is "Keep believing!" God had never forsaken the Maréchale when she trusted in Him. Depression and melancholy she regarded as lack of faith. She bade her secretary call a fiacre. When they got in, the officer said—

"You have the fare, Maréchale?"

"No!"

"But——-"

"The Lord have mercy upon you! Where is your faith? Get down on your knees and pray!"

The officer instantly obeyed. They both prayed—it was real prayer—and their hearts became lighter.

The fiacre drew up at the gate of a beautiful house in the Champs Elysées. It had to be kept waiting, for there was no money to pay the cocher.

The Maréchale was ushered into a luxurious apartment, and was soon talking with a Russian Countess about her soul. They had never met before, but they found common ground.

"I too," said the Countess, "adore the Christ! Come and see.... Look, the Christ!"

They stood before a beautiful picture of the thorn-crowned Redeemer.

"I adore Him!" she repeated.

"But it is one thing," said the Maréchale, "to adore Him here in these charming surroundings, and another thing to adore Him amidst the filth, the immorality and the misery of the Villette, where I live night and day among the poor and the dying, and where I have devoted young comrades who have left comfortable homes and bright prospects, and are now labouring for Christ and receiving nothing for it. What is your adoring Christ compared with theirs?"

The Countess was silent, and evidently felt bad. She had suddenly received a new ray of light upon the adoration of Jesus, and, realising that deeds are better than words, she left the room for a minute, to return with an offering of 500 francs.

It was by such gifts that the Army was maintained on the Continent. The Maréchale, it is somewhat strange to discover, was not only the apostle but the financier of the Armée du Salut in France. Others, of course, could administer the funds, but on her fell the burden of replenishing the exchequer. As years passed and the work extended, the task became more and more heavy. Officers had to be supported, the rent of houses and halls paid, the Training Home, the Rescue Homes, the Orphanages, the Homes of Rest maintained, and to meet all this outlay the Maréchale toiled, travelled, and wrote countless letters. Those who adored the Christ sent her their gifts from many lands.

While there were many generous supporters of the Army in France and Switzerland, the largest contributions came from the home-country. We have noted that the General did not like to see Catherine's hand-writing, because he thought of her weak spine. Yet in one day she and her secretary would sometimes write over a hundred letters with their own hands, which at the end were too cramped to go on with more. Experience had taught her the value of a personal application. Many a well-wisher who would have given £5 in response to a typewritten letter, did much better on receiving a warm appeal in the leader's own handwriting. She even made it a rule to write receipts herself.

Lean months tested the spirit of the Training Home. Though there was nothing to eat but a plate of cabbage-soup and a potato, the cadets never murmured. "C'est la vie apostolique," they cheerfully said one to another. And it was easy to bear any hardship when their leader shared it with them. One who was an officer with her for years wrote: "In all things she was our example. If you wished to incur her displeasure, you had but to give her something to eat which the workers did not have. As she was in delicate health, sometimes those around her would try to get a little luxury to tempt her appetite or strengthen her. They would be met with the answer: 'Whatever is this? It is not for me, I hope, because, though it is very good of you, I did not want it, and will not have anything of the sort.' Then she would share it all round."

Whenever it became known that the exchequer was almost empty, the officers and cadets knew that this was a call to prayer. On one occasion the rents of the Rue Auber and Quai de Valmy halls were due; there was nothing to meet them; and there were but three days of grace. These were days of agony. All the officers who had anything to spare gave it. The children in the orphanage gave three francs and ten centimes. But when the best had been done, not a tithe of the necessary 3000 francs was in hand.

Everybody met for prayer. The Maréchale spoke on the words, "Though the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines ... the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet will I rejoice in the Lord." She rang the changes on that "rejoice," asking, "Are we there?" Yes, they were all there—anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer with thanksgiving telling God their needs.

At such times the leader of the little band felt that God had to take care of His name, His honour; He had to send what was required. Who will call such a faith in question? Did not the German people say of Luther, "Look, there is the man who gets from God whatever he asks?" When the Maréchale was travelling with her secretary in a third-class carriage in the West of France, the poor people got in with their baskets of vegetables, and one of them said in a loud whisper, "Take care what you say; these people when they pray get from God all they want."

To return. On the morning of the last day of grace the Maréchale received a letter from Scotland containing a draft for £100, a "God bless you," and nothing more. She never knew what kind human heart had been moved to send the letter. But she never doubted that God had sent it.

Such occurrences were not solitary. Here is the testimony of M. Grandjean, who was for years one of the Maréchale's best officers. "I think with gratitude to God of the difficult days in which our faith was severely tested, when I was cashier in Quai de Valmy, and I had not a shilling, and we had to pay the 6000 francs for rents and other expenses. I shall never forget my overwhelming joy when one night I appealed to the cadets who could pray with faith, and when five or six of us prayed with me in the little kitchen of the Quai de Valmy. The next day the Maréchale received by the first post a cheque of 6000 francs from some one who did not know that we were in need."

In one of her tournées the Maréchale was labouring down in the South of France. Though she was in the greatest need and had a heavy heart, she went on with her meetings, when a lady who had been wonderfully blessed, and two of whose children had been saved through her ministry, was moved to give her a thankoffering of 5000 francs. Having to travel all night on the way back to Paris, and finding herself alone among a lot of working-men the Maréchale put the money in her bosom and prayed, "Now keep Thy little one," but did not dare to sleep.

Among the Army's unfailing supporters in France were the Maréchale's personal friends. One of the dearest of these was Madame de Bunsen, née Waddington, who wrote In Three Legations. They first met in Cannes, where the Maréchale was conducting a campaign in the theatre; and a great bundle of letters, partly in French and partly in English, testifies to the warmth of their friendship. Madame de Bunsen once persuaded the Maréchale to rest for some weeks in her castle on the Rhine; and another time she tried to induce her to visit Florence, but the Maréchale could never quite get over the feeling that taking holidays was backsliding.

Another of her constant supporters was Mr. Frank Crossley, that high-souled man of business whose Life has been admirably written by Rendel Harris. Soon after the Maréchale went to France he wrote to express his "ardent sympathy" with her work. "I have," he said, "met and known well several Christian workers—D. L. Moody, Miss Ellice Hopkins, Miss Mittendorff, and others—but I will tell you that perhaps none of these have created the same impression that you have done."

In one of her last letters she wrote "Tell me, how is it that what seems so far off to us is near to you." She was a beautiful soul and found peace in Christ.

he received hundreds of letters from him, and they are very interesting reading. What chiefly attracted him to the Maréchale was her intimacy with Christ, which was the reward, as he saw, of self-sacrifice. His words on this theme go very deep.

"It is a struggle hard and long, but it is only the struggling, who spend their life-blood in the cause, that can claim blood-relationship with the Lord Jesus. The rest are second-cousins or not even as near as that. They don't know Him very intimately or feel much at home with Him when they pay Him a morning call.... He makes the entrance high and the gate strait that it may be prized when gained—I believe that is the key to the mystery of life, or at least to a large part of it. To let us up to the top for the prayer of a moment and the sacrifice of nothing would in many cases at any rate be impossible and useless. Tell me soon more of how to climb. I am a slow learner."

Mr. Crossley's nature had a pensive strain which the Maréchale's friendship helped to modify. Regarding such a matter he felt that "speech should not go near the length of feeling," but ere long we find him writing, "Das hallelujah Vögelein singt in meinem Herzen."

His donations to the work of the Army both at home and in France were very generous. He gave the Maréchale many thousand pounds a year. His liberality was part of his worship of Christ. Nothing could be finer than the following: "I know you will be thinking it is a serious slice off my capital. Well, it is a branch off the tree. 'They broke off branches from the palm trees and strewed them in the way and shouted Hosanna,' and so do I." And again: "You are very grateful to me for what I have been able to give you, but if you knew how indebted and grateful I also felt to you, you would see how God makes us unequal that we may teach ourselves by the aid and necessary services He enables us to render." Mr. Crossley wished the Maréchale to accept a gift of £10,000 for the maintenance of her family, that she might be personally free from financial care, and also offered to build her a home outside Paris, but she declined both these offers, not wishing to be in a different position from the other officers of the Army.

In 1891 the Maréchale went to America to raise funds for the work in France. Accompanied by her secretary, Mme. Peyron—who was her Geneva convert Mlle. Roussel—she sailed in October by the Columbia for New York, and visited twenty-eight of the principal cities of the States and Canada, holding sixty meetings, travelling sometimes for thirty or forty hours at a stretch, and once with the added experience of being snowed up for twelve hours. She was everywhere very cordially received, and all the buildings in which she spoke were densely crowded. Ministers offered her churches in which a woman had never spoken before. After one meeting she received invitations from a Bishop and seventeen pastors to address congregations on her work.

The reporters everywhere found her and her utterances good copy. "She was not able to see representatives of the press in New York, although they came by dozens," as one learns from the Boston man who claimed to be "her first American interviewer." He found that "her life in France has given a Gallic twist to this Englishwoman's tongue. She is quite as French in manner as her staff-captain, Madame Peyron, the dark-eyed Frenchwoman who travels with her."

One morning she got a great reception from the divinity students of Yale, to whom she spoke at length on the qualifications necessary for "saving souls," namely, the possession of a pure heart and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. "When she had finished her address she said she was willing to answer any questions they might have to ask, and for half an hour the students and several of the professors poured a host of questions upon her that would have embarrassed and muddled the clearest-brained ministers of the country under similar circumstances. She, however, showed that she had answered questions before, and gave answers that brought both laughter and applause, for her wit is keenly cultivated."

It is interesting to see her through Yale eyes. "Her face is a study the like of which an artist or a sculptor might seek for years without finding. In repose it reminds one of the pictures of the Madonnas of Michael Angelo, but when she speaks its earnestness is so intense that it is almost stern. Her voice is one that any actress might well covet for its depth and strength. It is the equal of the great Bernhardt's, and yet it is sweet and soft, and has none of the harshness of the masculine tone. Her accent is something charming, for it has all the attractiveness of the English tongue made even more sweet by long familiarity with the French language. From her long acquaintance with the lower classes, the socialists and all free-thinkers of France, she has acquired that fiery directness and ease and attractiveness in her speaking which is so characteristic of French oratory and so fascinating to Americans. It is no injustice to this remarkable woman to say that, had she chosen the stage for her rôle in life, her name would have certainly been as famous in that profession as it is to-day as the Maréchale of the French Salvation Army."

In America she had the immense happiness of being reunited with her brother Ballington, who, being a year older than herself, had been her chum in childhood, and his wife, née Maud Charlesworth, who had been her brave girl-comrade in the first days of persecution in Switzerland.

In the end of January, 1892, the Maréchale returned to France, after an absence of three months and a half. America had given her $60,000 for her work, and memories of unlimited kindness.

CHAPTER XIII

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

"You have added a new word to the French language," said M. Sarcey, the famous critic, to the Maréchale; "I mean the word 'Salutiste.'" In 1881 there was not a single Salvationist in France or Switzerland. After fifteen years there were 220 stations and outposts, over 400 officers, headquarters in five cities, and four weekly papers.

But these bare facts only feebly indicate what the Maréchale did for France. In a moment of depression at the thought of French infidelity, the Princess Malzoff once remarked to her—

"The French have no soul."

"How dare you," asked the Maréchale, "say such a thing?"

Her friend replied with charming inconsistency, "But you have found the soul of France!"

That was perhaps the highest tribute ever paid to her.

If one asks some Frenchman who knew the Maréchale in those days how she won the heart of France, one gets the answer, "But it is natural—she has the French temperament; and, besides, elle aime la France." If one asks some convert of hers how she found the soul of France, the reply is, "Ah! she brought us the Christ, who is victorious everywhere." Both questions were answered together by one who, speaking for many, said, "She bought us at the price of tears and sacrifice."

When she was at the zenith of her power in France, an admirable appreciation of her was written[1] by one of the saints of the modern calendar, Miss Frances E. Willard. We extract a few sentences. "She inherits, it is said, beyond any other of the endowed and consecrated eight children of the General and Mrs. Booth, their special gifts, graces, and grace.... The Maréchale's career already fulfils her father's prophecy that women will, if once left free in their action, develop administrative powers fully equal and oftentimes superior to those of men.... 'I love France,' she said to me, with sparkling eyes: 'it is a great and wonderful country, and I love its people every bit as much as ever I loved my own. I have become familiar with its peasants in the provinces; have sat down with the French women who clatter about in sabots; have shared their chestnuts with them, heard of their sorrows as well as their joys, and, believe me, the human heart is just the same in France as it is everywhere; and if you classify the saints whose histories have come down to us, France would occupy the front rank. The nation that has produced a Lacodaire, a Pascal, a Fénelon, and a Madame Guyon, does not lack the germs of spiritual life.'"

[1] The Review of the Churches, Feb. 1894.

In 1896, however, her career in France came to an end. She received the command to go and devote herself to the work of the Army in Holland, and loyally prepared to obey.

Catholics and Protestants alike were dismayed at the news. One of her dearest friends, the Catholic scholar M. Lassaire, whose exquisite translation of the four Gospels had the honour of being put upon the Index Expurgatorius, came to her and said—

"You ought not to leave us. God has given you the ear of the nation as it is given only once in a hundred years."

"But I am commanded."

"If the angel Gabriel descended from heaven and bade you go, you ought not to leave France!"

Théodore Monod, whose own family had been greatly blessed through the Maréchale, deeply sympathised with her, and grieved over her departure almost as if she had been his own daughter, but tried to comfort her by saying, "You leave us your hymns!"

The day on which the Maréchale left France was one of the two or three dark days of her life. She felt somewhat like the young Scottish Queen who said as she gazed at the receding shores of Calais—

"Adieu! mon charmant pays de France,

Adieu! te quitter c'est mourir."

And yet she believed in her heart that God would work out His gracious purpose, which no circumstances can ever alter.

That she loved France with a deep, pure, passionate love does not need to be said. How France appreciated her in return may be indicated not only by M. Sarcey's emphatic dictum, "The devil take the country where she was born! she is French in her soul," but by any letter taken at random from hundreds which she received from men and women of France.

The following extract, faithfully translated, shows the calibre of the people whom the Maréchale was able to reach, as well as the warm, generous style in which the Latin races habitually express themselves.

"The evening in which you spoke of the scene on Calvary and the words of the penitent thief, 'Remember me,' that simple story, told by a believing soul, had more effect upon me than all the theses, quotations and theological arguments of all the doctors I have ever heard. That expression, that attitude, that conviction, that certitude, that assurance, that living faith which affirmed itself before me in an apostle, a new disciple of Christ, and that melodious voice, completed my transformation. I believed that I was the penitent thief and you the Christ who said to me, 'When I am in Heaven I will remember thee,' and that affirmation transported me....

"I marvel at the courage with which you endure fatigue, mockery, journeys, labours of all kinds to conquer for truth and light the millions of savages who are still in France, plunged in the darkness of error and superstition. Permit me to express once again my sincere admiration, and to offer you in the name of my country (I am perhaps a little presumptuous to speak in the name of France, but I have the right, as much as the other ten millions of citizens)—in the name of my country, and in the name of civilisation, my warm gratitude. Deign to accept the homage ... of a very humble soldier and disciple of Christ."

Swiss love, too, was now deep and strong, as will be sufficiently proved by a single letter, which enclosed a thankoffering.

"Dear Maréchale—(How much that word contains of affection, admiration, and veneration, I cannot express),—These thousand francs fulfil their end where they do the most good and give you the greatest pleasure. You always think of yourself last, if you think of yourself at all; that is why others must think of you. I would have liked to relieve you, dear Maréchale, you particularly and personally. But you are devoured by the zeal of your divine work, and all goes that way. Be it so! God will relieve you directly by His hand. He will, but do not forget yourself entirely, I beg of you. Care for yourself, for the sake of those who love you, and who need your help, and who find so much happiness in your heavenly affection.... In the love of Christ, your devoted, A.S."

In the end of that year the Maréchale needed words of good cheer, and they were not lacking. Her sister Eva was one of her comforters, sending many tender messages across the Atlantic. Just after Christmas Day—Eva's own birthday—she wrote: "I cannot say how much you have been in my thoughts. I wished I could have popped in and had a sister's birthday kiss and a good talk, but the Lord came very near to me, and I was cheered that His birthday found me very busy on mine seeking the poor lost souls of men. The years pass, but then what matters? Every day brings us nearer our Eternal home, does it not, and then we will live and love together for ever and ever, all of us. Dear, darling Katie, I don't like to hear you say the year has been a sad one. You are treasured by us all, by God and the world, and how much you have done for the Kingdom as well.... There are some fond memories I treasure which have to do with you and me, when I made you laugh and gave you baked potatoes! I will write again soon. Till then and for ever after always the same, Eva."

Commissioners E.D. and Lucy Booth-Hellberg—the General's youngest daughter—who took over the command of the Army in France and Switzerland, wrote in their first Annual Report (1896): "One of the last links in the long chain of desperate efforts for the salvation of France, put forth with undiminished love and faith by the Maréchale, was the Lyons campaign, which lasted for six weeks during the months of January and February. Supported by a number of believing and hard-working officers, she conducted a series of truly remarkable meetings in the Salle Philharmonique, which was filled on every occasion with an attentive and largely sympathetic audience. The results of the campaign were most encouraging and of a decidedly permanent nature. The local corps, which up till then had led a very struggling existence, received a powerful lift and is now in a healthy condition. Furthermore a considerable amount of prejudice against our work was removed and a number of friends and sympathisers were made, the immediate result of which was the establishment of a Rescue Home for women in that city." Later on Lucy wrote to the Maréchale, "Darling, your love for France is wonderful; you cannot understand it."

Had the Maréchale been sent to another of the Latin races—for example, the Italians or the Spaniards—her gifts might still have been used to the highest advantage. She once conducted a brief campaign in a great hall at Turin. At the beginning she encountered a storm of opposition. While she dedicated the child of one of her former officers, her voice was drowned in an uproar which turned the solemn service into a fiasco. The audience got completely out of hand, and, as a final stroke of devilry, a troop of students, headed by a big fellow with an evil, cynical face, came marching up the aisle, shouting, yelling and brandishing sticks. The ringleader had made a bet that he would kiss the Maréchale. Her officers began to think it was high time to close the meeting. But she was not near the end of her resources. Giving her familiar order, "Leave them to me, and pray!" she stepped to the edge of the platform, and, when the leader was within a foot of her, fixed her eyes on his face, raised her finger, and sang—[2]

Si tu savais comme Il t'aime,

Sans tarder tu viendrais à Lui,

Tu viendrais à l'heure même,

Tu viendrais dès aujourd'hui.

[2] This hymn was composed by one of her officers, M. Grandjean. The tune was one of the sweetest operatic airs of the day.

The clear, sweet notes went vibrating through the great hall, and Italy knows the power of song. The ringleader stood staring as if he had been petrified, and his followers did not advance another step. While the Maréchale sang on, she was heard in breathless silence. Then she spoke for an hour. The after-meeting lasted till midnight, and the leader of the students, completely broken down and sobbing like a child, said, "Oh, stay with us, you will make angels of us all!"

In Holland, where the Maréchale laboured six years, she was heavily handicapped by the fact that most of her speaking had to be done through an interpreter. She had not that Open Sesame to the heart of a people—the mastery of its language. She learned, however, to sing beautifully in Dutch, and the translation of her addresses was admirably done by her secretary. If she could not deny that her heart was still in the Rue Auber of Paris, she repressed her tears and took her new task—a very tangled one—resolutely in hand, doing some deep and lasting spiritual work in Amsterdam and other towns, where she sometimes had as many as forty or fifty penitents in one night.

She was lacking in what a statesman called "Batavian grace," being cast in a very different mould, yet she came ere long to feel quite at home among the warm-hearted Dutch people. She had taught Paris to sing her hymn, "Aimez toujours, et malgrez tout aimez toujours," and now she put the lesson into practice in Holland. Preaching and living the gospel of love, she had many tokens of success among all classes. Best of all, she awoke in others the wistful desire to imitate her example. One of Queen Wilhelmina's cabinet ministers brought his daughter, a thoughtful young girl, to a meeting conducted by the Maréchale, and when those who were willing to give themselves to Christ and His service were invited to show it in some way, up went the hand of this eager girl. Her father at once whisked her out of the meeting. But the deed was done, and now there is no one who is doing a nobler work among the poor and sunken classes of Holland than Miss Rose Pierson. Of that happy day in her life she wrote long afterwards: "When I first heard the Maréchale speak I was a girl of seventeen. I remember still every word she spoke. I know it was a revelation to me what a reality Christ could be to a soul. I believe that was what impressed me—her perfect assurance of Christ's presence and her own ardent love of souls."

Holland gave the Maréchale two of her most efficient secretaries, Miss Van der Werken and Miss de Zwaan, who ideally fulfilled all the requirements of the office—ability and willingness to nurse a babe, make a cup of tea, write a letter, cook a decent dinner, talk in two or three languages, keep the door of a hall, preach a sermon, and generally make the best of everything!

It is possible that the Maréchale's exile from France deepened and enriched her nature, drawing out stops not so often used before, especially the vox humana—the voice of sympathy with all human pain and sorrow. At the same time she began to have a more tragic sense of the world's sin, which prompted one of her strangest and yet most characteristic impulses, and issued in what was in some ways the most remarkable of all her campaigns.

One midnight, while she lay awake in Amsterdam, she heard a clear inner voice saying to her, "Go to Brussels; go in sackcloth and ashes; go and tell of sin; let everything in your person speak of sin and awaken conscience; then proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world."

Without waiting to take counsel with flesh and blood, she went with her nurse-secretary Swaan and her babe Frida, the child of peace, to Brussels, and hired for three weeks the most beautiful hall in the city, the Salle de la Grande Harmonic—the same in which fair women and brave men danced on the eve of Waterloo.

When she at length divulged to one of her comrades the fact that she was to appear in sackcloth and ashes, he answered—

"You cannot! never!"

"I must, it is so commanded."

So a robe de bure was made for her—a single-seamed garment of the coarse brown stuff worn by monks, with a hole cut out for the neck and two for the arms, and a hempen rope for the waist.

Before the opening meeting she had intimate dealings with her officers. "It is necessary," she said, "that one die for the people. I want to bring that thoughtless, frivolous city into touch with God. I wish your faces to speak of another world. It is your minds and hearts that I seek. If you are going to think of your own people and your own concerns, if you are going to be preoccupied with a hundred and one things, go back at once. I am going to live these three weeks as if they were the last on earth. I have left home and little ones and am going to exist for this town. If Christ laid down His life for us, we have got to lay down our lives for the salvation of Brussels." There were heart-searchings and confessions and tears among the officers; fresh alliances were made with God; and the Maréchale believed that this was one of the secrets of the wonderful success of that campaign.

On the evening of the first meeting, she clothed herself in the robe de bure, and put real ashes on her head. But if ever the devil in person attacked any poor soul, the Maréchale felt herself so assailed in those moments when the great hall was filling and she was waiting. What shafts of ridicule were hurled at her as by a spiritual foe! Could any dress he more ridiculous, any realism more contemptible? How comical was that assumption of the rôle of prophet! What a miserable fiasco the whole performance would prove! She was seized with a paralysing fear, and when Antomarchi—her "St. Francis"—came to announce that the audience was ready, he found her white as a sheet and shaking from head to foot.

"Have I made a mistake?" she asked.

"No! Maréchale, go on! go on! it is all right!"

"Tell them to sing and pray, and then I will come."

Her soul gathered strength from the strains of her own hymn, "O toi! bien-aimé fils de l'homme," with the chorus—

Viens, Jésus t'appelle;

Ne sois plus rebelle.

Viens au bien-aimé Fils de Dieu,

Crois en sa tendresse éternelle—

as well as from the succeeding silence in which she knew that faithful hearts were praying for her. The clouds vanished, the fear of men was gone, and only the awe of the unseen world remained upon her spirit.

Slowly she walked onto the platform, not raising her eyes from the ground. The audience seemed petrified by the strange apparition. After a moment of deathly silence, her clear, penetrating voice sounded through the hall.

"'He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ... and we esteemed Him not. Nous n'en avons fait aucun cas.'

"If I wear mourning to-night, it is the better to express the feelings which are in the depths of my heart. Your people, who are capable of great things, are going to their ruin. On all hands there are nameless miseries, despairing cries of women and children without defence and exposed to shame and the most frightful misery, and why? Because you have made Him—Christ—of no account. I mourn your sins, the sins of your country; the drunkenness, the debauchery, the selfishness, the wrongs which are seen everywhere; your rejection of the Christ of God, the Saviour of the world. This fills me with sorrow, and this, unless it is forsaken, will bring upon you the judgments of God."

Thus she unburdened her soul, and thus began not a three weeks' but a two months' campaign, which from the first moment—in so strange contrast to the tumultuous openings at Havre and Rouen—was marked by a beautiful reverence and solemnity. The services of the police were never required during the whole time. Four or five evening meetings were held every week, besides afternoon gatherings, salon meetings, and midnight suppers. All Brussels was moved. An eminent statesman said to the Maréchale, "Everybody has been ridiculed here except you. Ridicule kills everything; you have killed ridicule."

In the full tide of the mission she wrote to her father: "Most marvellously is God working here in Brussels. Last night I had the concert-hall crowded and a great number were turned back at the door. The silence, the attention is unbroken, and there is conviction among all kind of persons. Worldly and Catholic papers speak beautifully of us. Four journals have given leading articles to me. Praise God, it is all His work! This morning I had a conversation with a senator who is at the head of the party of progress here, and he says that the movement is the most remarkable "the city has seen for a hundred years and that the effects are profound and astonishing." Another senator has sent me £20. I feel more than ever now I ought to continue and push the battle. We shall be able to do something extraordinary and put Belgium on a new footing."

The first senator referred to in the letter was M. le Jeune, who said to the Maréchale—

"The bar, the artist world, society, Catholic and Protestant—they have all come to hear you. You are universal, Madame."

"Yes," she answered, "the Christ is universal."

During these two months she had daily interviews with men and women crushed under the burden of all kinds of sin—a burden that weighed so heavily on her own spirit that sometimes, instead of delivering an address, she could only fall on her knees and cry to God to forgive all the sins that come from the heart of man—murders, adulteries, thefts, uncleanness, lies, blasphemies—all of which had been confessed to her.

It was a time of wonderful spiritual blessing for all her comrades, who, like her, literally "lived for the people." One of them said, "We have grown as much with you in these weeks as in twenty years."

To a thousand men of the élite of Brussels she delivered an address—which was afterwards published—on "The Greatest Injustice of the Century." It was a woman's mournful, tender, passionate protest against man's sins in a city which had its twelve thousand so-called filles de joie, many of them of the tenderest years. One of her audience, a typical Brussels man of the world, covering his face with a hand on which flashed a diamond ring, and shaking with great sobs of anguish, cried, "I am a leper—damned already!" "Madame," said an editor, "they would hiss anybody else who said these things to them. They bear them from you, because they feel you love them."

One day she received an invitation to dine with a dozen anarchists. Her comrades told her of the danger of bombs, etc., but she went, and, many years after when asked by an English Divine, "How did you get into such society?" she answered, "Extremes meet."

"So you are come to talk to us," said Elisée Recluse[3] with a smile, "of justification by faith and sanctification by faith," etc.

[3] Exiled from France as an anarchist, he had become a Professor in Brussels. He had been trained as a Protestant Pastor. He was the greatest geographer of modern times, the writer of Une nouvelle géographie universelle (19 vols.).

"Oh, no, no! I do not talk of doctrines. They never troubled me in my life. I care only for realities. You have suffered; I too have suffered. Let us begin there, and compare notes. Some of you have been in prison; I have been in prison. You have been exiled; so have I. You have wept over the injustice and cruelties of the world; so have I wept, so do I weep."

And thus they found common ground, agreeing in their diagnosis of the diseases of society; differing only as to the remedy. "You believe in anarchy," said the Maréchale. "One of your number said at one of my meetings that anarchy is the most beautiful of all religions. I know a more excellent way—a shorter cut to making the world better. You fling your bombs to destroy life; how can people be converted when their heads are gone? Christ said 'Follow me to Calvary!' He shed His own blood. No one else's. He bids us save the world by denying ourselves and taking up the Cross."

That evening Elisée Recluse drove her in his carriage to her meeting at the Salle Harmonie, and in her little ante-room they prayed together.

A Brussels sculptor begged the Maréchale to pose for him in her robe de bure, but she declined. Renée Gange, the heroine of the Belgian socialists, after passionately embracing her before a thousand eyes, published a charming pen-and-ink portrait of "this enigmatic woman," comparing her to a serene, calm statue that almost smiles. "The fine and slender figure of the Maréchale will long remain one of the most curious, the most strange apparitions in the midst of our society of money-makers and machine-constructors."

The prophet, the mystic, the saint will always be a mystery to the art and science, not to speak of the sin and selfishness, of the world. This truth was finely expressed by a writer in L'Art moderne of Brussels. "The Maréchale does not seek to 'demonstrate' anything. I have seen her shrug her shoulders a little and smile when some one wished to reason or discuss with her. She could do it, for she is intelligent and merveilleusement intuitive. But her faith does not 'demonstrate' itself. It lives and expands itself. It affirms itself. And those who, now numerous, have some psychological tact have felt that this woman obeyed something more powerful than herself. Perhaps she is the happy and unconscious instrument of an expansive force too much ignored, too little recognised and obeyed, as necessary for our preservation as the law of self-preservation itself.... Her addresses are neither weighed nor balanced. But they have the colour, the life, the strong suggestiveness, the moving sincerity of an inspiration come from one knows not where, from above us, from outside us—mysterious impulses of things eternal."

CHAPTER XIV

TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE

In the year 1902 the Maréchale and her husband severed their connection with the Salvation Army. Concerning the causes that led to this, it is their united wish that nothing should be said that would interrupt the good feeling that has always existed, and still exists between them and thousands of their old and dearly loved comrades in that organization.

There are those who have misjudged the Maréchale in this matter, as having taken this step for personal advantage, and without due regard to its effect on her father and his work. How little do they know the truth. To one who has read the correspondence of those days, and all other days since, who has watched within the inner circle of the home, overhearing the most confidential conversations, nothing could be so shocking a contravention of the truth as to accuse this devoted daughter either of parental disregard, or self-willed unconcern for the welfare of the Kingdom of Christ. This step cost heart's blood to the Maréchale.

"Katie," said the General in Victoria Station, when she was starting on her second journey to France, "you have remarkable instincts; follow them, and you will never go wrong." Twenty years after, her friend Mlle. Constance Monod, the daughter of the great French preacher, wrote to her, "I would beseech you to trust yourself, trust your divine instinct, which God has developed so, so wonderfully in you."

Heredity, training and experience had combined to give her the instincts of a prophetic soul-winner. The grace of God had imparted to her a spirit of wisdom and revelation. Her intuitions were at once her strength and her safety. Her instinctive love of the true, the beautiful, and the good, her instinctive hatred of the false, the sordid, and the selfish, formed the touchstone to which she brought everything in the moral, social and religious life of France. Great numbers of the élite of Paris and other cities, who were technically far better educated than she, came and sat at her feet, because they bowed to the authority of the Christ-Spirit in her. And her instincts of sympathy with poor, sick, suffering souls drew multitudes who were outside the pale of the Church to the Saviour.

She always maintained that she went on her mission as a simple English girl, doing only what any other girl, with the same opportunities and the same faith, might have done. There is a divine power in a woman's instincts of purity and righteousness which puts the baseness of men to shame. That power, many believe, will be the chief factor in the salvation of the modern Church and modern society. Ours is an age which needs Deborahs and Huldahs with their divine instincts. The Song of Songs tells how a simple Hebrew girl, tempted by the glory of the world, but strong in her passion of holy love, merited the wonderful ascription, "Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners." If the Christian womanhood of the twentieth century rises to that level, the future of the Kingdom of God will be far more glorious than its past.

The Maréchale's instincts for the beautiful in nature and in art doubtless constituted no small part of her charm for the Latin races. She looked at all the glory of heaven and earth with a poet's eyes. During her early crowded life of evangelism in England, her father once took her on a tour through the Trossachs of Scotland, and the memory of that vision of beauty at the age of sixteen ever afterwards haunted her like a passion. "Let me stay here!" she said to the General, whose reply, calling a soldier to arms, equally remained in her memory: "Men are more interesting than scenery." If she scarcely ever took holidays in after life, it was not that she did not sometimes sigh for the wings of a dove that she might fly away and be at rest. There was a lifelong conflict between the natural and the ascetic in her.

She had never had time to cultivate any art except music, but her sense of everything lovely in form and colour and sound was exquisite, and she became without study a supreme artist in at least one department. At the time of the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, there was a grand Exhibition of all that women can do in the modern world. A deputation waited on the Maréchale and begged her to give an address along with two other well-known lady speakers. She agreed to come, provided she should be allowed to choose her own subject. Consent was readily given, and she delivered an address in French upon what Christ has done for Woman and what Woman for Christ. She gave no thought to the manner of delivery; she merely realised that she had a golden opportunity of proclaiming her Saviour to a magnificent audience. She had never in her life received a lesson in elocution, and to have done so might have seemed to her wicked backsliding. But she was awarded the palm of eloquence.

If her scholastic education was somewhat defective, she was wonderfully guided by her instincts in her later self-education. During her American tour she was taken one day by three white-haired professors to see the greatest library in the States. Her unsophisticated mind was bewildered by all that mass of learning. "Surely," she said, "it must strike despair into the minds of the students!"

One of her guides questioned her about her own favourite books.

"Well," she answered, "I have never been a reader; I think I have only two."

"What might they be?"

"One of them you know."

"Yes, the Bible; what is the second?"

"The Heart of Man. I am always at it, on land and sea, in the streets and in railway carriages, morning, noon and night. It helps me with my first book better than any commentary."

She came to know the Bible with a thoroughness which not one man in ten thousand ever attains. Her spiritual instinct seized, and her extraordinary memory retained, the vital and the essential. She never studied the Bible in the ordinary way, sitting down with lexicon and concordance. There was no time for that in her busy life. She took her spiritual food from the Bible as the bee sips honey from flowers. The Bible was her companion and she read it for pleasure. She absorbed and assimilated it without effort. That she knew much of it by heart was of less importance than the fact that it became part of herself. Therein lay her power of expounding and applying it. "Nothing," said Dr. Munroe Gibson after listening to her nightly for a week, "charmed our people more than her expositions of Scripture."

The truths by which she lived came to her intuitively. Her religion did not consist of commandments and dogmas. It was life, light, liberty, and above all love. Alike in what she accepted and what she rejected, she acted instinctively—she could do no other. She had an aversion to religious controversy. Arguments made little or no impression upon her mind. She might sometimes be overwhelmed with theological doctrines, the truth of which she could neither affirm nor deny, but in the end she would emerge with the naïve remark, "I am a very simple child, and I must have a child's religion." She always held that Christ's religion is for the multitude, and that the multitude are children. The essence of Christianity can be assimilated by boys and girls who do not know how to read and write, and they may become saints and saviours. A glance at the Maréchale's well-used Bible suffices to prove that for her the heart of the Old Testament is in Hosea, the prophet of love, and Isaiah the prophet of atonement, while the heart of the New Testament is in the story of the returning prodigal or the penitent Magdalene.

Genius is never easy to understand. Its weakness is often related to its strength. It has what the French call the defects of its qualities. A great part of the Maréchale's power certainly lay in her childlike humility. As a soul-winner she never gave the impression of condescending. She did not need to stoop; by nature and by grace she was meek and lowly in heart. What drew multitudes of poor sinners to her was their assurance that she would hear with human sympathy their tales of sin and sorrow. At one of her midnight suppers a French lady said to her, "I have been here all these years trying to bring these poor girls together. How is it that you succeed where I fail, in getting them to open their hearts to you?"

"Perhaps," said the Maréchale, "it is because I do not make them feel that there is a difference between them and me."

With her humility there was bound up a certain measure of self-distrust. In her, as in her father, whom she resembled so strongly in spirit as well as in features, there was an extraordinary combination of confidence and diffidence. It used to be said by those who knew the General most intimately that, while he commanded an Army, he was apologetic to his cook. And if the Maréchale had a splendid moral courage, as her manner of dealing with hostile crowds abundantly proved, she had also a womanly timidity in which there lay a certain subtle danger. So long as she had faith in her God-given instincts, and in the individual guidance of the Holy Spirit, she was unconquerable, but if anything undermined them her power was for the time being paralysed. For the criticisms of the world she cared little or nothing, but the real love and understanding of her comrades was as the breath of life to her. From them she was always eager to learn, and sometimes she let the judgment of others obscure her spiritual and womanly intuitions.

She would sit at the feet of this or that teacher who spoke with an air of wisdom and authority, when in nine cases out of ten the relation of teacher and taught ought to have been reversed. As a rule, her instincts made her a swift and unerring discerner of spirits, but there were exceptional cases in which it almost seemed disloyalty to "try the spirits whether they are of God." One of her life-long friends, Mr. W. T. Stead, who went down on the ill-fated Titanic, knew both sides of her character—her lion-like boldness as well as her dove-like gentleness. He used to relate how she one day invaded the office of the Pall Mall Gazette, and summoned him with all the categorical imperiousness of her nature and her mission to quit politics and edit the War Cry. Yet he used to say to her, with a seriousness that was not altogether assumed, "You are damned by your humility!"

It is well known that the Maréchale's husband was for a time a believer in Dr. Dowie, the Scotsman who founded Zion City beside Chicago. Finding that certain doctrines such as Faith Healing, the Second Advent, the Rapture of the Saints, which were to him, as to thousands of others, of vital importance,—were being faithfully preached by one who claimed to be the second Elijah, the Forerunner of Christ, Mr. Booth-Clibborn became a member of the Christian Catholic Church. Having been a Quaker minister before his twenty years of faithful service in the Salvation Army, he also cherished the hope of perfecting Zionism by adding to it his own peace principles.

The Maréchale could not accept Dr. Dowie's claims, but in her intense desire for family unity she consented to go with her husband to see Zion City, taking her two eldest daughters, Evangeline and Victoria, then fourteen and thirteen years of age, and baby Josephine, who was but four months old, with her. They remained there four months, July to October, 1902.

The diary and letters which she wrote during that visit are psychologically and Spiritually among the most interesting human documents I have ever seen, and sufficiently indicate her attitude of mind at this time. But let us draw a veil, except for one or two incidents and extracts, over the dark anguish of soul, the torture of uncertainty, and the depths of despair which she then passed through.

She implored Dr. Dowie to take her husband and ordain him without her, but he emphatically refused to do so.

The following paragraph, taken from her diary, shows in what a painful predicament she found herself. Speaking of a friendly adviser, she says: "He said, as I was the wife, the responsibility was on my husband, and I must stand by him, even if he was in error, and God would forgive me if it was a mistake." I felt so much taken aback by the way he looked at the matter that I turned the key of my heart.

To one of her dearest friends she wrote a long letter, which was a cry out of the depths: "I am not easily given to discouragement or despair, but my position must make angels weep, if they can weep. I cannot bring myself to accept Dowie, so much in him violates the highest spiritual instincts I have.... The forcing of me outwardly does not convince me. I have yielded all along the line, and now here I am ... but I am not in despair. I have been. It seems to me as if God, who has seen the long agony, will himself open the door. I cannot go further in this direction.... I feel a fear over everything. I never was so unutterably unhappy in my life, never. Oh, will you not help me?"

One day the prophet was attacking some noted evangelists of the day. Presently he began to fulminate against the Salvation Army, and accused the General of failing to reprove the sins of the rich. The Maréchale leapt to her feet, and facing the prophet with outstretched finger and flashing eye, an image of outraged justice, exclaimed, "That is an untruth! No man has been more faithful in reproving the rich than my father and it is cowardly of you to attack a man who is not here to defend himself." The prophet visibly quailed under the withering rebuke. It was the first time any one had withstood him to the face. With an hour of thundering oratory he tried to obliterate the impression made on the vast audience, but for once he was evidently checkmated.

At length Dr. Dowie, seeing he could not overcome the Maréchale's opposition, and that her unwilling presence in the city was a disturbing factor among his people, requested her and her husband to withdraw. Mr. Booth-Clibborn, of whose absolute sincerity there can be no doubt, was keenly disappointed at having to turn his back upon Zion, which had become to him, as the Salvation Army in its early days a cause to live for, and if need be to die for.

The strain on the Maréchale had been so great that when she arrived in England she was utterly prostrated. Two dear old cousins of her husband's, the Misses Susan and Esther Bell, in Eastbourne, nursed her back to life. Then came two dark, silent years in Brussels. The Maréchale looked for a friend and found none. All the world believed that she had "joined Zion." The French papers announced that she had burned (brulé) the principles for which she had once fought. Her daughter Victoria, who was with her in those years of lonely sorrow, writes: "Gradually her strength left her. She suffered dumbly, vainly hoping for some deliverance. Was this the Maréchale who had led her army to battle and faced the howling mob with a smile on her face? Her sorrow had crushed and sapped her courage which the storm of persecution only served to quicken."

Her children had starvation staring them in the face; another terrible illness, brought on by household care, laid her low; her spirit was exhausted by the torturing strain of years; and she could hold out no longer. In a "blind faith, without conviction," she was received into Zion Church. Broken on the wheel of life, stretched too long upon the rack of this tough world, she accepted—like Savonarola and Galileo, like Cranmer and Jeanne d'Arc—an alien creed, without her reason being convinced or her heart won.

But—again like those—not for long. Her deliverance came in a startling fashion. Soon after her removal with her family to Paris, her husband began to suffer from the effects of a neglected influenza which settled in his knee. True to his principles, he refused to see a doctor. When he was at the brink of death, the Maréchale brought in a physician in the guise of a friend. The sick man's case was at first pronounced to be hopeless, but three of the finest surgeons of Paris were hastily summoned, performed four operations, and saved his life, leaving him, however, crippled for the rest of his days.

The dismissal of Mr. Booth-Clibborn followed as a matter of course. He had violated the strictest laws of Zion by accepting the aid of surgery. Two of his own converts, now followers of Dr. Dowie, invaded the sick room, and handed him the fateful document. Some time afterward he wrote: "Dowie was a good man at one time. So was the devil. Dowie fell through the same sin—Pride." In addition to a statement which was published in four countries, he has recently borne the following conclusive testimony: "The Maréchale would never have had anything to do with Dr. Dowie but for me. When she came near him it was on every occasion unwillingly. She suffered unutterable anguish, pain and grief, from the fact that from the first all her instincts, as well as the consciousness of her true religious interest, were against Dr. Dowie's spiritual personality, his ways, his claims, his style of government. If, in a kind of despair, she went with me into it, though she was in it she was not of it. It was never sought, it was endured. The only comfort in the enduring was the possibility of doing a little good meanwhile to people in it, and of ultimately helping in the opening of my eyes."

CHAPTER XV

SURSUM CORDA!

All the Maréchale's hearers remember her penetrating gaze. No one ever encountered her eyes and saw them shift. Thousands have felt as if she were looking through all disguises into their very souls, and her tapering index finger has often made the bravest quail. "All through the night," wrote a convicted sinner, "I saw her finger pointing straight at me." And one feels certain that her look was never more direct, never more searching, than when it was turned inward. She has always had a passion for seeing things as they are, especially the things of the spirit.

We are not surprised, therefore, at her often repeated words: "This experience has taught me the folly of violating God-given instinct, and allowing the inner light of God's Holy Spirit to be darkened by man. When I compare myself with what I was in the past, in many respects it seems as if that person was dead!"

Drawn by the cords of love, held by ties too sacred to be broken, worn by years of poverty and sickness, and moving at last in a kind of trance, more dead than alive, one of God's truest and bravest servants blindly stumbled on till she found herself, for a time of agony, in a spiritual prison-house from which there seemed to be no escape.

Her greatest danger lay in a kind of fatalistic submission, which would have meant permanent disloyalty to her own ideals and convictions, as well as the abandonment of her vocation. She read the letters of Père Didon, whose heroic acceptance of his destiny influenced her in the direction of sinking her individuality. And one cannot understand the exquisite torture of her position unless one realises that her mind had often been made an arena of conflict between the apparently irreconcilable claims of the domestic and the apostolic life. And yet, Father Hyacinth once said to her in Paris, "You are the only woman I have ever met who has reconciled the vocation of a mother with that of an apostle." It may be appropriate to say here that the prayers of both father and mother have been answered in the conversion of their ten children, who have of their own free will consecrated themselves to the service of Christ. Four sons and three daughters are already engaged in active evangelistic work, and have been used of God for the conversion of many souls.

To bring the Maréchale back to liberty, God used the voices of nature, of children and of friends.

She had always had a poet's sensitive ear for earth's thousand voices of praise, and, sitting in a garden on a spring morning, she wrote: "The past, whoever was right or wrong, shall be buried. Let the dead bury their dead. Leave it, and this beautiful spring-tide let us begin again. The crocuses and snowdrops in this lovely garden all say, 'New Resurrection life!'"

Her own children's voices called her back into the thick of the old spiritual battle. "Now for the children," she wrote; "they must all see some salvation work, and they will feel the glow of the heavenly fire. It will warm them, and say something far more than all the Bible lessons in the world." Her eldest daughters, at that time girls of sixteen and fifteen, but with a wisdom far beyond their years, literally pushed her into the war, and if ever she was unable to go they buckled on their armour and took her place. "Mother writes me," says Victoria in her journal, "that Evangeline held a beautiful meeting on Sunday because she herself was too ill to go. Poor mother, it is difficult for her to keep up her courage." This diarist of fifteen thus philosophises on the meaning of her mother's sorrow. "Everybody can understand why God lets people of the world, the infidels, the self-seekers, the indifferent, suffer. It is to bring them to Himself through disappointments in the world, in themselves, and in others. But why He allows His children that love Him, those whose greatest wish is to serve Him—why He allows them to suffer is a mystery. Perhaps it is to bring them into still closer communion with Himself, so that they may become one with Him—His, body, soul and spirit, without reserve."

The Maréchale's friends helped to bring her back to her predestined work of soul-winning.

During a time of awful silence, in which she never received a call and rarely a letter, she had not courage to visit any of her old comrades in Paris. Once, in her great sorrow, she wanted to get away to some sympathising friend and open her heart. At first she could think of no one, but suddenly she remembered a humble working woman, and, taking the train to Paris, she wearily climbed to the fifth story of a house in the Villette, sat down in this woman's little room, and burst into a flood of tears. Her friend tried to comfort her and, not quite understanding this passionate grief, made her lie down in her own bed while she prepared for her a delicious little French meal.

Twenty years before, on a dark winter night, the Maréchale was passing along the Seine embankment on the way to her place of meeting on the Quai de Valmy. She noticed a girl gazing at the dark, cold waters, and a voice told her that she was meditating suicide. Touching her arm she said—

"Don't look at those black, cruel waters. Come with me and have a nice cup of coffee. You seem to be in trouble."

The girl, whose face was dark and sullen, looked at her suspiciously, and did not speak. The Maréchale gently pleaded with her to come and hear a lady sing.

"She sings beautifully, and you will find light and warmth and comfort, and you will have a good cup of coffee. Do come with me."

The girl at length consented and came. She heard the Maréchale herself sing. She sat right through the service without opening her lips and with a hard look on her face. At the end the Maréchale went down beside her, asked if she had enjoyed the meeting, and said a word to her about the goodness of God. At the mention of the name of God, the girl burst into passionate speech.

"God! Don't talk to me of God! I hate Him. What has He done for me? Why did He take my mother? He doesn't care for me. If He did He would not have let me be born in prison. What have I done to deserve such a life as this? It isn't my fault."

But, while the Maréchale talked with her and prayed with her, the girl's heart was softened. She began to attend the meetings, and soon gave her heart to the Lord Jesus. Born in a prison, and saved from suicide in the Seine, she became in turn her rescuer's best comforter in an hour of supreme sorrow.

When the Maréchale at length plucked up heart to revisit England, after a long absence and silence, her steps were directed to the home of a dear friend and kindred spirit in South London. It was in early girlhood that Mrs. Holman of Jerviston was first attracted to the Maréchale. Her mother had, as Lady Mayoress, invited Miss Booth, before the work began in France, to address a drawing-room meeting in her house, and the indelible impressions made on a receptive mind on that day proved an inspiration to a lifetime of quiet and devoted service of Christ. But so timid and dejected had the Maréchale become that she dreaded the reception that might await her even in the home of a lifelong friend! She trembled as she dragged herself across Streatham Common. She sat down on a seat and—her ruling passion strong as ever—spoke to a beggar about his soul, feeling a certain new kinship with all outcasts and pariahs. When she stood before her friend's door she scarcely had courage to ring the bell, and if she had been told to go to the kitchen and have a cup of tea with the servants, she would have answered quite simply, "Yes, I will go." But Mr. Holman himself opened the door, and his hearty welcome and the outflow of a perfect sympathy at once cast all her fears to the winds. Her friends were ministering angels to her. They nursed her back to health, dried her tears, and made her smile. Their little daughter—now one of the sweetest singers in London—carolled to her every morning and awoke "the hallelujah bird" again in her own breast. And God Himself was meanwhile doing for her what even the best of friends could not do—giving her the Resurrection Life, re-animating her hope, baptising her afresh with the Spirit, not of fear, but of power and of love, breaking all shackles and making her free—free from the ensnaring fear of man, free to obey the Divine call she had received even as a child—woman's Pentecostal call to prophesy for Christ, her one and only Master.