Chapter V: Part 5

"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 Marechale. "Considering what a sinner he has been, you should not mind by whom the change has come. He has been converted in the _Armee 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 _Armee du Salut_. In Paris and Nimes, England and Belgium he worked with ardour for the salvation of souls. He was with the Marechale in her Brussels campaign.[1]

[1] Described in chap. xiii.

He married Mlle. Babut, the daughter of the well-known pastor in Nimes. 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 Marechale came to Nimes 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 Marechale--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 Ecole 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 Marechale 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, Marechale?"

"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 Elysees. It had to be kept waiting, for there was no money to pay the _cocher_.

The Marechale 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 Marechale, "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 Marechale, it is somewhat strange to discover, was not only the apostle but the financier of the _Armee 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 Marechale 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 L5 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale received a letter from Scotland containing a draft for L100, 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 Marechale'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 Marechale 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 _tournees_ the Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale's personal friends. One of the dearest of these was Madame de Bunsen, nee Waddington, who wrote _In Three Legations_. They first met in Cannes, where the Marechale 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 Marechale to rest for some weeks in her castle on the Rhine; and another time she tried to induce her to visit Florence, but the Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale'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 Voegelein singt in meinem Herzen."

His donations to the work of the Army both at home and in France were very generous. He gave the Marechale 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 Marechale to accept a gift of L10,000 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 Marechale 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 role in life, her name would have certainly been as famous in that profession as it is to-day as the Marechale 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, _nee_ Maud Charlesworth, who had been her brave girl-comrade in the first days of persecution in Switzerland.

In the end of January, 1892, the Marechale 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 Marechale; "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 Marechale 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 Marechale, "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 Marechale 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 Marechale'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 Fenelon, 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!"

Theodore Monod, whose own family had been greatly blessed through the Marechale, 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale--(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 Marechale, 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 Marechale 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 Marechale, 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 Marechale, "Darling, your love for France is wonderful; you cannot understand it."

Had the Marechale 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 Marechale. 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 a Lui,
Tu viendrais a l'heure meme,
Tu viendrais des 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale, 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale'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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 role 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! Marechale, 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-aime fils de l'homme_," with the chorus--

Viens, Jesus t'appelle;
Ne sois plus rebelle.
Viens au bien-aime Fils de Dieu,
Crois en sa tendresse eternelle--

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 Marechale, "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 L20. 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 Marechale--

"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 _elite_ 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 Elisee 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 geographie 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 Marechale. "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 Elisee 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 Marechale to pose for him in her _robe de bure_, but she declined. Renee 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale 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 Marechale.

"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 _elite_ 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 Marechale'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 Marechale 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 naive 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 Marechale'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.