The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)Strahan, James
Religion
The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)
Strahan, James
Booth-Clibborn, Catherine, 1860-1955
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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