Read Ebook: The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn) by Strahan James

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"This was the one attraction. When I went to France I said to Christ: 'I in You and You in me!' and many a time in confronting a laughing, scoffing crowd, single-handed, I have said, 'You and I are enough for them. I won't fail You, and You won't fail me.' That is something of which we have only touched the fringe. That is a truth almost hermetically sealed. It would be sacrilege, it would be desecration, it would be wrong, unfair, unjust if Divine power were given on any other terms than absolute self-abandonment. When I went to France I said to Jesus, 'I will suffer anything if You will give me the keys.' And if I am asked what was the secret of our power in France, I answer: First, love; second, love; third, love. And if you ask how to get it, I answer: First, by sacrifice; second, by sacrifice; third, by sacrifice. Christ loved us passionately, and loves to be loved passionately. He gives Himself to those who love Him passionately. And the world has yet to see what can be done on these lines."

In the early spring of 1881 Captain Catherine Booth and her intrepid lieutenants, Florence Soper, Adelaide Cox and Elizabeth Clark, who enjoyed the privilege of her example and training, began life in Paris. Later on they were joined by Ruth Patrick, Lucy Johns and others. Soon after they were joined by the General's youngest son, Herbert Booth, who is proud of having received his first black eye in assisting his sister during those early fights, and Arthur Sydney Clibborn, who lived a life of unparalleled devotion and heroism, and later became the Mar?chale's husband. Years before Canon Barnett and his band of Oxford men were attracted to Whitechapel, these fresh young English girls settled in a similar quarter of the French capital. What quixotic impulses carried them thither? They had no social or political ideals to realise. They had not been persuaded that altruism is better than egoism, that the enthusiasm of humanity is nobler than the pursuit of pleasure or the love of culture. They were not weary of the conventions of society and seeking a new sensation in slumming. They were not playing at soldiers. But they, too, had their dreams and visions. They loved Christ, and they wished to see Christ victorious in Paris. Coming into a wilderness of poverty, squalor and vice, they dared to believe that they could make the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. They had the faith which laughs at impossibilities.

The first letter Catherine received from her father after she set foot in France breathed tender affection and ardent hope. "Oh, my heart does yearn over you! How could you fear for a single moment that you would be any less near and dear to me on account of your brave going forth to a land of strangers to help me in the great purpose and struggle of my life? My darling, you are nearer and dearer than ever.... France is hanging on you to an extent fearful to contemplate, and you must regard your health, seeing that we cannot go on without you. We shall anxiously await information as to when you make a start. Everybody who has heard you and knows you feels the fullest confidence in the result. Nevertheless I shall be glad for you to get to work, seeing that I know you won't be easy in your mind until you have seen a few French sinners smashed up at the penitent form."

With her own hand Catherine raised the flag at Rue d'Angoul?me 66, in Belleville. Here was a hall for six hundred, situated in a court approached by a narrow street. The bulk of the audience that gathered there night after night were of the artisan class. Some were young men of a lower type, and from these came what disturbance there was. The French sense of humour is keen, and there were many lively sallies at the expense of the speakers and singers on the platform. Every false accent, every wrong idiom, every unexpected utterance or gesture was received with an outburst of laughter. But the mirth was superficial, and the expression on the faces of the tired men, harassed women, and pale children was one of settled melancholy. Catherine instinctively felt that what they needed was a gospel of joy; certainly not the preaching of hell, for did they not live in hell? These toiling sisters and brothers were the multitudes on whom Jesus had compassion.

"Thank you," said the Capitaine, "you have helped me to-night. Have you understood what I have been saying?"

"I believe that you believe what you say."

"Oh! of course I believe."

"Well, I was not sure before." With a sigh he added, "Have you time to listen?"

"Yes, certainly."

It was midnight and they were alone. As he began in softest tones to tell the story of his inner life, she felt the delicacy of the soul that is hidden under the roughest exterior. He said, "I had the happiest home in all Paris. I married the woman I loved, and after twelve months a little boy came to our home. Three weeks after, my wife lost her reason, and now she is in an asylum. But there was still my little boy. He was a beautiful child. We ate together, slept together, walked and talked together. He was all the world to me. He was the first to greet me in the morning, and the first to welcome me in the evening when I came home from work. This went on till the sixth year struck, and then...." His lips twitched, and he turned his face away. His hearer softly said, "He died." He gave a scarcely perceptible nod, and smothered a groan. "And then," he continued, "I went to the devil. Before the open grave in the P?re Lachaise cemetery, with hundreds of my comrades about me, I lifted my hand to heaven and cried, 'If there be a God, let Him strike me dead!'"

"But He did not strike you dead?"

"No."

"He is very gentle and patient with us all. And now you have come here to-night. Does it not seem to you a strange thing that you out of all the millions of France, and I out of all the millions of England should be all alone together here at midnight? How do you account for it? Isn't it because God thought of you, and loves you? ... Do you ever pray?"

"I pray? Oh, never! Perhaps I prayed as a child, but never now."

"But I pray," said the Capitaine, and, kneeling down, she prayed a double prayer, for herself as well as for him. She wanted this man's salvation for her own sake and the work's sake. For weeks she had been fighting and praying for a break, and she felt as if on the issue of this wrestling for a single soul depended the whole future of the work in France. While she prayed for his salvation from sin she was silently praying for her own deliverance from doubt and fear and discouragement. And both prayers were heard. When she opened her eyes, she saw his face bathed in tears. She knew that his heart was melted, and she spoke to him of the love of God.

"But I have hated Him. I have hated religion; I have come here to mock you; I have called you Jesuits."

"Yet God loves you."

"But why did He allow my wife to lose her reason? Why did He take my child if He is love?"

"I cannot answer these questions. You will know why one day. But I know He loves you."

"Is it possible that He can forgive a poor sinner like me?"

"It is certain."

?mile was won. Some nights afterward he gave his testimony, and for seven years he always stood by the Mar?chale. He was her best helper. When he used to get up to speak, there was immediate attention. "Citizens," he would say, "you all know me. You have heard me many times. This God whom I once hated I now love, and I want to speak to you about Him."

After this, conversions became frequent. The mercy-seat was rarely empty. One of the first French songs of Catherine's composition contained the most curious idioms:

Quand je suis souffrant, Entendez mon cri, etc. --Donnez moi Jesus.

But she sang it with such feeling that it was the means of the conversion of a clever young governess, who became one of her most devoted officers.

Then another striking conquest was made. One night a rough fellow, partly drunk, approached the Capitaine and said a vile word to her in the hearing of "the devil's wife," who dealt him a blow that sent him reeling across the hall crying, "You dare not touch her, she is too pure for us!" Catherine rushed between them and stopped the fight. Thus "la femme du diable" was won, and from that time she got two or three others to join her in forming Catherine's bodyguard, who nightly escorted her and her comrades through the Rue d'Allemagne, which was a haunt of criminals, and saw her safe at the door of her flat in the Avenue Parmentier.

When Baron Cederstr?m was seeking local colour for his painting "The Mar?chale in the Caf?," he drove down with his wife to a meeting in the Rue d'Angoul?me. As they approached the hall, the Baroness caught sight of some of the faces and took fright.

This painting is now in the picture gallery of Stockholm. The artist, as is well known, afterwards married Madame Patti.

"Go back, go back!" she shouted to the coachman.

The Baron tried in vain to reassure her.

"You have nothing to fear," was the answer; "I am here every night." But as the Baroness was led up to the front seats, she still cast scared looks at the people she passed.

Some of the politically dangerous classes did give trouble for a time. Knives were displayed and some blood was shed. An excited sergeant of police declared one night that half the cut-throats of Paris were in that hall, and by order of the authorities it was closed. Soon, however, the meetings were again in full swing, and when Catherine's eldest brother Bramwell, her comrade in many an English campaign, paid her a flying visit three months after she left home, he was delighted with all that he saw. "The meetings," he wrote, "are held every night. The congregations vary from 150 to 400.... On Sunday, at three, I attended the testimony meeting, which is only for converts and friends. About seventy were present. Miss Booth took the centre, and gathered round her a little company. I cannot describe that meeting. When I heard those French converts singing that first hymn, 'Nearer to heaven, nearer to heaven,' I wept for joy, and during the season of prayer which followed my heart overflowed. Here, using another tongue, among a strange people, almost alone, this little band have trusted the Lord and triumphed.... Then testimonies were invited.... I wept and rejoiced, and wept again. I glorified God. Had I not heard these seventeen people speak in their own language of God's saving power in Paris during those few weeks! I require all who read this to rejoice. I believe they will. Remember how great a task it is to awaken the conscience before Christ can be offered; to convince of sin as well as of righteousness; to call to repentence as well as faith.... On the following night 300 were present.... Miss Booth stepped off the platform as she concluded her address, and came down, as so many of us have seen her come down at home, into the midst of the people. Her closing appeal seemed to go through them. Many were deeply moved. Some of those sitting at the back, who had evidently come largely for fun, quailed before one's very eyes, and seemed subdued and softened. God was working."

Later in the year the new headquarters on the Quai de Valmy were opened. Here there was a hall for 1200. No other form of religion could draw such an assembly of the lowest class of Parisians as nightly met in it. The men came in their blouses, kept their caps on their heads, and--except that they abstained from smoking, in obedience to a notice at the door--behaved with the freedom and ease of a music-hall audience. But the earnest way in which most of those present joined in the hymns proved that they were not mere spectators, and it was astonishing that many rough, unkempt, and even brutal-looking men soon learned to sing heartily without using the book.

There were a hundred converts in the first year and another five hundred in the second. Paris herself began to testify that a good work had been begun in her midst. On the way to and from the hall in the Rue d'Angoul?me Catherine, who by this time had begun to be endearingly known as the Mar?chale, the highest military title in France, used often to meet a priest, to whom she always said "Bon jour, mon p?re." One day he paused and said, "Madame la Mar?chale, I want to tell you that since you began your work in this quarter the moral atmosphere of the whole place has changed. I meet the fruits everywhere, and I can tell better than you what you are doing." She felt that God sent her that word of encouragement.

It began to be commonly believed that the Mar?chale could work certain kinds of miracles. A woman who had attended the meetings, and been blessed in her soul, became convinced that the English lady had power to cast out devils, and one day she brought a neighbour to the physician of souls, introducing her with the remark, "She has not only one but seven devils." The new-comer had a frightful face. She was so drunken, immoral and violent that nobody could live with her. Yet she, too, had a soul. The Mar?chale made her get down on her knees, put both her hands on her head, and prayed that the devils might all be cast out. "She's now another woman," was the testimony soon after borne by all her neighbours.

"I feel I live over again in you." The thought was evidently habitual in the General's mind. "He bids me tell you," wrote Emma, "that you are his second self." The resemblance was physical as well as spiritual. With her tall figure, her chiselled face, her aquiline nose, her penetrating blue eyes, Catherine became, as time went on, more and more strikingly like her father. One of her sons, who saw her stooping over the General the day before he died, said that the two pallid faces were like facsimiles in marble.

In the autumn of 1883 the Mar?chale suddenly leapt into fame as a latter-day Portia, brilliantly and successfully pleading in a Swiss law-court, before the eyes of Europe, the sacred cause of civil and religious liberty. The land of Tell, the oldest of modern republics, has always been regarded as a shrine of freedom. It has shown itself hospitable to all kinds of ideas, even the newest, the strangest, the most anti-Christian, the most anti-social. There is a natural affinity between free England and free Switzerland.

"Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice; They were thy chosen music, Liberty."

In the "Treaty of Friendship" between Great Britain and Switzerland, drawn up in 1855, it was agreed that "the subjects and citizens of either of the two contracting parties shall, provided they conform to the laws of the country, be at liberty, with their families, to enter, establish themselves, reside and remain in any part of the territories of the other." Yet the presence of a few English evangelists in Switzerland evoked a storm of persecution in which the first principles of religious liberty were as much violated as ever they had been in the days of the Huguenots.

If good order was not always maintained at her meetings, it was not her fault, but that of the authorities who refused to do their duty. History repeats itself. As in ancient Thessalonica during the visit of St. Paul, so in modern Geneva, some citizens, "moved with jealousy, took unto themselves certain vile fellows of the rabble, and gathering a crowd set the city on an uproar." The ringleaders of the disturbance were paid by noted traffickers in vice, who were themselves often seen in the meetings inciting the audience to riot. One of the first converts, a student, confessed that he had got twenty francs a night, and as much whisky as he could drink, to make a row.

The Department of Justice and Police chanced at that time to have as its president a Councillor of State, M. Heridier, who thought it right not to punish the offenders but to banish their victims. In a sitting of the Grand Council he said, "We have been petitioned to call out a company of gendarmerie to protect these foreigners, and to prevent brawls and rows. I will not consent to take such a step. There are already eight police agents in these places every evening who have a very hard time of it.... These agents might be doing more useful work elsewhere, and I am just about to withdraw them." That meant handing over the strangers to the tender mercies of the mob. It was a gross breach of the laws of hospitality and chivalry as well as of the constitution of a free country. The city of Calvin did not know the day of its visitation.

The Mar?chale and her comrades began their meetings in the Casino on December 22, 1882. The hall was crowded, and soon there was raging a great battle between the powers of light and darkness. A disturbance had evidently been organised. A band of students in coloured caps, who had come early and taken possession of the front of the galleries and other prominent positions, were on their worst behaviour. The first hymn was interrupted by cries and ribald songs, and the prayer which followed was almost drowned. But the Mar?chale was never more calm and confident than when facing such music. At every slight lull in the storm, she uttered, in clear, penetrating tones, some pointed words which pierced many a heart. Within an hour she not only had subdued her audience but was inviting those who desired salvation to come forward to the penitent form. Scoffers of half an hour ago left their places, trembling under the sense of guilt, and as they knelt down the Mar?chale sang, in soft notes, the hymn:

Reviens, reviens, pauvre p?cheur, Ton P?re encore t'attend; Veux-tu languir loin du bonheur, Et p?cher plus longtemps?

O! reviens ? ton Sauveur, Reviens ce soir, Il veut te recevoir, Reviens ? ton Sauveur!

A strange influence stole over the meeting, hushing the crowd into profound silence, and the Spirit did His work in many hearts.

But the soldiers of Christ, clad in armour of light, were more than a match for the powers of darkness. Many a winged word found its mark, and the after-meeting in the smaller hall, into which three hundred were crowded, was pervaded by a death-like stillness, in which many sought and found salvation. Some of the ringleaders of the disturbance had pushed their way into this room; but they remained perfectly quiet, evidently subdued and over-awed, with an expression on their faces of intense interest, which showed that they felt they were in presence of a reality in religion which they had not before encountered. The Mar?chale sang her own hymn "Je viens ? Toi, dans ma mis?re," and many joined in the chorus:

Ote tous mes p?ch?s! Agneau de Dieu, je viens a Toi, Ote tous mes p?ch?s.

One of those who were melted by the words wrote: "I was like the demoniac of Gadara. I may say I was possessed; I was chained for fifteen years to a frightful life.... It was then that you came. I was at first astonished; then remorse seized me. Then followed a frightful torment in my soul--a real hell. I resolved to put an end to it one way or another. Yet I thought I would go and hear you once more. I had been in darkness and anguish since the day of the first meeting. No word had I been able to recall of that day's teaching, except the words of the sacred song 'Ote tous mes p?ch?s' . These sounded in my heart and brain through the day and the sleepless night--these and these only. Bowed down with grief and despair, again I came to the Reformation Hall, and to the after-meeting. The first sounds which fell on my ear were again those very words, 'Ote tous mes p?ch?s,' and then you spoke on the words, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow'; you seemed to speak to me alone, to regard me alone--and I felt it was God who had sent me there to hear those words."

Hundreds of such letters were written. Evidence came from all sides of blessing received in many homes, of wild sons reclaimed, of drunkards and vicious men transformed by the power of God, of light and joy brought into families over which a cloud had hung. Not only anarchists and prodigals, but students of theology and the children of pastors had their lives transformed. In a meeting for women only, at which 3000 were present, the daughter of Pastor Napoleon Roussel began the new life. Her brother had been one of the converts in the first meeting in the Reformation Hall. Mlle. Roussel was to be the Mar?chale's secretary for five years, and accompany her in a great American tour. A divinity student who attended a "night with Jesus" on New Year's Eve, wrote: "I passed a long night of watch, which I shall never forget. Since then I am ever happy, and can say 'Glory to God' every hour of the day."

But as the tide of Divine blessing rose, the tide of human hatred also rose, and in the beginning of February the "exercises" of the Army were by Cantonal decree forbidden. A week later, the Mar?chale, with a young companion, Miss Maud Charlesworth, now Mrs. Gen. Ballington Booth, was expelled from the Canton of Geneva. During her six weeks in the city she had been used to bring about probably the greatest revival which it had witnessed since the days of the Reformers.

One of the most eminent lawyers of Geneva, Edmond Pictet, who had himself been greatly blessed during those stirring weeks, helped her to draw up an Appeal to the Grand Council. He found, however, that she needed but little help, and often remarked that with the warm heart of an evangelist she combined the lucid intelligence of an advocate. When the Council of State had deputed two or three of its members to hear her on the subject of her Appeal, she came back to Geneva under a safe-conduct to meet them. In the course of the interview, at which the British Consul in the city was present, the leading Councillor said, "You are a young woman; it is not in accordance with our ideas and customs that young women should appear in public. We are scandalised by it." The rejoinder which he received was so remarkable a defence of "the Prophesying of Women" that we give it in full.

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