Catherine Booth Part 10

'I know I ought not, of all saints, or sinners either, to be depressed. I know it dishonours my Lord, grieves His Spirit, and injures me greatly; and I would fain hide from everybody to prevent their seeing it. But I cannot help it. I have struggled hard, more than any one knows, for a long time against it. Sometimes I have literally held myself, head and heart and hand, and waited for the floods to pa.s.s over me.'

But our Army Mother did not give up working for G.o.d, and sit down in despair, because she was thus tried. One day, just before leaving for a great West-End Meeting, in which G.o.d made her words as a sharp two-edged sword, she wrote this to one of her children:--

'I have been very much depressed since you left--more so than usual. It is of no use reasoning with myself when these fits of despondency are on me. I must hold on and fight my pa.s.sage through; and when I get to Heaven the light and joy will be all the greater. If I dared give up working I should do so a hundred times over; but I _dare_ not.'

Another and constant hindrance which our Army Mother had to fight for the greater part of her life was poverty. It was so difficult, many times, to make two ends meet. She had, during many years of her life, no regular money coming in on which to depend, and during that time it was a constant struggle to have her children properly cared for and give them the needed education.

But most of all did our Army Mother show herself a warrior in her own Salvation campaigns. In those early days there were no praying Soldiers and Sergeants to be had to deal with the penitents--no one, either, to lead her singing, scarcely even to keep the doors or take up the collection. She would arrive in a town absolutely alone. A hall had been taken in which she was to speak, and she would hire a tiny lodging, or stay in whatever home would receive her, and set to work. We can scarcely understand the loneliness of her position. Here was a proof of her mighty faith in G.o.d.

She began these solitary campaigns when her sixth child was but a few weeks old, and G.o.d most wonderfully owned her labours. At one place she saw one hundred grown-up people and two hundred children come to her penitent-form in six days. But it was a fearful battle.

'I have a comfortable little cot to stay in,' she writes to her mother from one such battle-field, 'very small and humble; but it is clean and quiet; and when I feel nervous no one knows the value of quietness. I have felt it hard work lately. Many a time have I longed to be where the weary are at rest.'

At Margate, some years later, she commenced her Meetings without knowing a single person in the place. For some weeks she had not even a helper in the Prayer Meetings, nor one who would give out a song for her. Mrs.

Booth could not sing herself, and there was often an awkward pause before any one would be willing to pitch her tune. 'If only,' she said when The Army was fairly on its feet, 'I had been able to command a dozen reliable people such as I could have anywhere now, I think I could have done almost anything.'

Even more wonderful was her experience at Brighton.

The Dome, a great building holding three thousand people, had been taken for her Meetings.

'I can never forget my feelings,' says this Soldier-saint, 'as I stood upon the platform and looked upon the people, realizing that among them all there was no one to help me. When I commenced the Prayer Meeting, for which I should think quite nine hundred remained, Satan said to me, as I came down from the platform according to my custom, "You will never ask such people as these to come and kneel down here? You will only make a fool of yourself if you do." I felt stunned for a moment; but I answered, "Yes, I shall. I shall not make it any easier for them than for the others. If they do not realize their sins enough to be willing to come and kneel here, they will not be of much use to the kingdom."'

The Lord set His seal upon Mrs. Booth's faith and courage, for the first to volunteer were two old gentlemen, both over seventy years of age; and she had ten or twelve at the mercy-seat before the Meeting ended.

Writing from Portsmouth, she tells the same story of loneliness and victory:--

'You say, "How do you get on personally?" Oh, I never was so hampered for help in every way in all my life! The most able man I have keeps a milliner's shop, and the one that opens for me generally is an overseer; so their attention is divided and the time limited. Pray for me. I never needed your prayers so much. This is a dreadfully wicked place.'

Yet during the seventeen weeks of her stay some six hundred names were taken, many of them wonderful trophies of G.o.d's mercy.

Having lived such a warrior's life, you think, very likely, that the death-bed experience of our Army Mother would be all peace and glory. But no. Right down into the Valley she needed to use the Sword of the Spirit and the s.h.i.+eld of Faith, for to the last Satan was allowed to test and try her.

But she fought on!

'One of my hardest lessons,' she said in her last hours, 'has been the difference between faith and realization; and if I have had to conquer all through life by naked faith, I can only expect it to be the same now.

All our enemies have to be conquered by _faith_, not realization; and is it not so with the last enemy, death? Yes, if it please the Lord that I should go down into the dark valley without any realization, simply knowing that I am His, and He is mine, I am quite willing--I accept it.'

This is the faith that made our Army Mother and all the Bible saints such conquerors. It is the secret of their victory--the faith without which it is impossible to please G.o.d, and for which we all need to pray, 'Lord, increase our faith.'

XI

LAST DAYS

'As I look back on life I do not remember the houses I have lived in, the people that I have known, the things of pa.s.sing interest at the moment.

They are all gone. There is nothing stands out before my mind as of any consequence, but the work I have done for G.o.d and Eternity.'--MRS.

BOOTH.

If The General and those who loved our Army Mother best had been able to choose for her, they would most likely have said: 'Let her live and fight and work on, up to within a few days of her promotion to Glory. Let the call come quickly and painlessly, as it has come to others in our ranks.'

But the Lord, who loved her more than we did, saw fit to send to her two and a half years of ever-increasing weariness and suffering. For long months she lay on the very bank of the River, longing for the messenger of Death to carry her across. Those who loved her could not tell why the Lord sent her this last fiery trial; they could only bow with her, and say, 'Thy will be done.'

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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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.

But step by step the disease grew worse. First she was forced to give up Meetings and public work. Then it became impossible for her to use her right hand, and she was therefore obliged to give up her correspondence, though she still continued to dictate her letters, and learnt also to write with her left hand.

Soon her daily drives became too tiring, and by and by she went out of the house into the little garden for the last time; and then for the concluding twelve months of her life she was a prisoner in her room, lying in constant suffering.

But during these long months the greatest joy and relief that could come to her was to hear of some fresh victory or triumph for the Kingdom of Jesus. Her interest in The Army and her love for the people were as keen as ever, and War Councils were held and new developments planned in her chamber, and much of The General's Darkest England Scheme for the poor and outcast was thought out and decided upon beside her sick bed.

Again and again, too, Mrs. Booth would receive deputations of Officers of different cla.s.ses and from various countries in which The Army was at work, who came to Clacton-on-Sea, where the last fifteen months of her life were spent, to listen to her words of advice and inspiration.

There were no Corps Cadets in those days; but our Army Mother left some specially beautiful words about the Juniors, to which I must refer.

When she was told by the Officer then in charge of our Junior Work in England that the children loved and prayed continually for her, she smiled.

'The thought of the little ones,' says some one who was there, 'brought our beloved Army Mother wholly out of herself and her pain and weariness.'

'A very choice branch of the work,' she said. 'I have often told Emma that I hoped when I was too old for public work G.o.d would let me end where I began--with the children. But it seems that it is not to be so.'

'Give the children,' she went on, in reply to the messages they had sent, 'my dear love, and tell them that if there had been a Salvation Army when I was ten I should have been a Soldier then, as I am to-day.

Never allow yourself to be discouraged in your work. I know you must meet with many discouragements; but I am sure the Spirit of G.o.d works mightily on little children long before grown people think they are able to understand.'

Again and again during that last year of awful suffering it seemed as if Mrs. Booth were about to leave us; but then she would revive, and come back to endure more weeks and months of agony.