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