"It is true! But I try, oh, my God, I try!"
"But it does not come in that way—by our struggles."
"Then how?" he exclaimed in a tone of despair.
"Does He not say, 'Abide in me, and ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you'? Does not St. Paul testify, 'I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.' How many have given praise to Him who is 'able to save to the uttermost' and 'able to present us faultless'! Put Him to the proof. If any one has the right to salvation, surely you have."
They paused under a tree in the stillness of evening, and, while he stood with bowed head, she knelt beside him and prayed.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RENUNCIATION OF HOME
Early in 1887 the Maréchale became the wife of Mr. Arthur Sydney Clibborn, an Irish gentleman of Quaker extraction, lineally descended from Barclay of Ury, the hero of one of Whittier's finest poems. Brought up in Bessbrook, which was called the model town from the fact that there was no public-house, police barracks or pawnshop in it, he renounced excellent business prospects in answer to a call which first came to him through a simple, earnest Quaker minister, "Sydney, will thee not come with us?" The visit of some representatives of Salvationism to Bessbrook turned the current of his thoughts in a new direction, making him exclaim, "Here is primitive Quakerism, primitive Wesleyanism, primitive Christianity!" As he had spent some years at school in Switzerland, and become proficient in French and German, he was sent by General Booth to assist the Maréchale in France, and acted as her chief of staff until their marriage.
He was a man of great courage, and received a medal from the French President for saving life from drowning. As a servant of God he would, one cannot but think, have made a splendid Huguenot or Covenanter. His heroic ideal was the persecuted Quaker whose blood he had in his veins. In the Salvation Army's early days of conflict he was the bravest of the brave. He was stoned and covered with mud in the streets of Geneva. He was pursued by a Parisian mob that howled "Down with Jesus Christ!" His life was attempted many times, and he was condemned to death by the Nihilists under the seal of the Paris headquarters; but he never went out of his way to avoid death or use carnal weapons.
Mr. Booth-Clibborn has been specially used of God in removing the difficulties of those troubled with intellectual doubt and in opening the eyes of a large number who were in spiritual darkness.