Booth, Catherine Mumford, 1829-1890; Salvation Army -- Great Britain -- Biography
It was in February, 1888, that Mrs. Booth, who was anxious about her
health, went to consult a great doctor and get his opinion. She was
alone, for no one had thought her illness was so serious. She asked him
to tell her the truth--all through her life, as you know, she wanted the
truth; and after a little hesitation he told her.
The truth was the saddest that she could hear. That dreadful
illness--cancer--through which she had so tenderly nursed her own dear
mother, had come to her, and in the doctor's opinion she had much
suffering to pass through, and only two or, at the most, three years
longer to live. Mrs. Booth listened calmly, thanked the doctor, and
then, getting once more into the cab, drove home all alone.
It was a dark journey. The War needed her. The General needed her. Her
children needed her. And yet the sentence of Death had been passed upon
her, and she must soon leave them all. What did she do? I think you can
guess.
She knelt down in the cab, and in prayer committed to God, in a new and
deeper way than ever before, her own body, and her dear ones and the work
He had given her to do.
At last the cab stopped before her own door, and The General came out to
meet her.
'I shall never forget that meeting in this world, or the next,' he says.
'I had been watching for the cab, and had run out to meet her and help
her up the steps. She tried to smile on me through her tears; but,
drawing me into the room, soon told me, bit by bit, what the doctor had
said. I sat down speechless. She rose from her seat, and came and knelt
beside me, saying: "Do you know what was my first thought? That I should
not be there to nurse you in your last hour."
'I was stunned. I felt as if the whole world were coming to a standstill.
Opposite me, on the wall, was a picture of Christ on the cross. I thought
I could understand it then, as never before. She talked to me like an
angel; she talked as she had never talked before. I could say little or
nothing. I could only kneel with her and try to pray. That very same
night The General was to leave London for some great Meetings in Holland,
and Mrs. Booth would not hear of his changing his plans and remaining
with her.
'The War must go on' was her thought, even when all her family stood
stunned and heart-broken around her, unwilling to leave her even for a
moment.
Two years later, when but a few more days of suffering remained to her, a
last message from her lips reached us as Self-Denial Week began. 'The War
must go on' was one of its sentences.
'The War must go on' had been as her motto, lived out in all the long,
long months that lay between. Instead of immediately laying aside her
work, when the doctors gave their dreadful judgment, and beginning to
think only of herself, she went on with it as long as her increasing
weakness allowed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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