The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)Strahan, James
Religion
The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)
Strahan, James
Booth-Clibborn, Catherine, 1860-1955
"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.
*CHAPTER V*
*FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD*
In the autumn of 1883 the Maréchale 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.
When the Maréchale and some comrades accepted an urgent invitation to
Switzerland, she little thought that she would be the heroine of an
historical trial. She went to preach the gospel. She observed the laws
of the land, and respected the religious susceptibilities of its people.
When she entered Geneva, she published only one poster, and that after
it had been duly _visé_; she allowed no processions, banners or brass
bands in the streets. Her only crime was that she sought to gain the
ears of those who never entered a place of worship, and that she
marvellously succeeded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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