The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)Strahan, James
Religion
The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn)
Strahan, James
Booth-Clibborn, Catherine, 1860-1955
She had never had time to cultivate any art except music, but her sense
of everything lovely in form and colour and sound was exquisite, and she
became without study a supreme artist in at least one department. At
the time of the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, there was a
grand Exhibition of all that women can do in the modern world. A
deputation waited on the Maréchale and begged her to give an address
along with two other well-known lady speakers. She agreed to come,
provided she should be allowed to choose her own subject. Consent was
readily given, and she delivered an address in French upon what Christ
has done for Woman and what Woman for Christ. She gave no thought to
the manner of delivery; she merely realised that she had a golden
opportunity of proclaiming her Saviour to a magnificent audience. She
had never in her life received a lesson in elocution, and to have done
so might have seemed to her wicked backsliding. But she was awarded the
palm of eloquence.
If her scholastic education was somewhat defective, she was wonderfully
guided by her instincts in her later self-education. During her
American tour she was taken one day by three white-haired professors to
see the greatest library in the States. Her unsophisticated mind was
bewildered by all that mass of learning. "Surely," she said, "it must
strike despair into the minds of the students!"
One of her guides questioned her about her own favourite books.
"Well," she answered, "I have never been a reader; I think I have only
two."
"What might they be?"
"One of them you know."
"Yes, the Bible; what is the second?"
"The Heart of Man. I am always at it, on land and sea, in the streets
and in railway carriages, morning, noon and night. It helps me with my
first book better than any commentary."
She came to know the Bible with a thoroughness which not one man in ten
thousand ever attains. Her spiritual instinct seized, and her
extraordinary memory retained, the vital and the essential. She never
studied the Bible in the ordinary way, sitting down with lexicon and
concordance. There was no time for that in her busy life. She took her
spiritual food from the Bible as the bee sips honey from flowers. The
Bible was her companion and she read it for pleasure. She absorbed and
assimilated it without effort. That she knew much of it by heart was of
less importance than the fact that it became part of herself. Therein
lay her power of expounding and applying it. "Nothing," said Dr. Munroe
Gibson after listening to her nightly for a week, "charmed our people
more than her expositions of Scripture."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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