All the world knows how her soul was moved that the church of God should uphold our Christian cause, and that the M. E. Conference should seat its women delegates. At that time her word came to me: “If the M. E. pastors don’t endorse our blessed gospel, so much the worse for them—in history, that’s all! ‘This train is going through; clear the track!’ I want you in a delegation to the General Conference in May. Will Mrs. Bishop Parker allow her name added? It is a blessed chance to put a blessed name to a most blessed use. Oh that he may see this for the sake of God and Home and Humanity!”
Frances Willard’s fearless mind threw a searchlight into any new thought that seemed worthy of exploration. She investigated Swedenborgianism, Faith-healing, Psychic and Christian Science—if perchance she might find the soul of truth which is ever at the origin of all error. She was not afraid of the evolution of man, for she early realized that the works and word of God must harmonize; that when science and religion should better understand themselves and each other there could be no real conflict,—and she joyed in this larger vision. After a visit to my house, in 1896, she wrote thus to Judge Merrick: “Christ and His gospel are loyally loved, believed in and cherished by me, and have been all along the years; nor do I feel them to be inconsistent with avowing one’s position as an evolutionist: ‘When the mists have cleared away,’ how beautiful it will be to talk of the laws of the universe in our Father’s house, and to find again there those whom we have loved and lost—awhile. In this faith I am ever yours.
“Frances E. Willard.”
It is scarcely worth while to say that she often was the subject of the doctrinaire. At one time a noted advocate of the faith cure was her guest, and was using all diligence to lead Miss Willard to embrace her “higher life.” She said to this lady: “Come with me to-day to see a friend, a lovely woman, who seems to me to walk the higher life of faith in great beauty and peace and power for others. I think you will be kindred spirits.” The visit was made, and the two strangers fell into each other’s arms, as it were, in the intensity of their spiritual sympathy. On their return to Rest Cottage, Miss Willard quietly said to her guest: “That friend is one of the most noted Christian Science healers.” Now this was the chiefest of heterodoxies to the faith-healer. “How I did enjoy her shocked astonishment,” Miss Willard gleefully said to me, “and I told her I was more than ever sure how truly one, in the depths of their natures and their essential faiths, are those who are sincerely seeking to know God.”
Frances Willard’s spiritual life was too overflowing and comprehensive to find expression in creeds. Her own new beatitude, “Blessed are the inclusive, for they shall be included,” is a fair statement of her doctrine as it related to her human ties, and to all the household of faith. Her whole law and gospel was “To love the Lord thy God with all thy heart—and thy neighbor as thyself:” and she found God in His works as well as in His Word, and His image in every beautiful soul that passed her way—and always her spirit ascended unto the Father. She herself was regenerate by love, and she expected love alone—enough of it—to transform the world. She wrote me: “Be it known unto thee that I believe—and always did—that the fact of life predicts the fact of immortality. Lonesome would it be indeed for us yonder in Paradise were not the trees and flowers and birds we loved alive, once more with us to make heaven homelike to our tender hearts. How rich is life in friendships, opportunity, loyalty, tenderness! To me these things translate themselves in terms of Christ. Perhaps others speak oftener of Him, and have more definite conceptions of Him as an entity; but in the wishful sentiment of loyalty and a sincere intention of a life that shall confess Him by the spirit of its deeds I believe I am genuine.”
Just after the Boston World’s and National Conventions of 1891, Lilian Whiting—that keen analyzer of motive and character—wrote: “Frances Willard is a born leader; but with this genius for direction and leadership, she unites another quality utterly diverse from leadership—that of the most impressionable, the most plastic, the most sympathetic and responsive person that can possibly be imagined. Her temperament is as delicately susceptible as that of an Aeolian harp; one can hardly think in her presence without feeling that she intuitively perceives the thought. She has the clairvoyance of high spirituality.
“No woman of America has ever done so remarkable a work as that being done by Frances Willard. There is no question of the fact that she was called of the Lord to consecrate herself to this work. She is so simple, so modest, so eager to put every one else in the best possible light, so utterly forgetful of self, that it requires some attention to realize her vast comprehensiveness of effort and achievement. If ever a woman were in touch with the heavenly forces it is she. Frances Willard is the most remarkable figure of her age.”
Some one else in a private letter writes: “Her strength was because she could love as no one else has loved since the Son of Man walked the earth.”