TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE
In the year 1902 the Maréchale and her husband severed their connection with the Salvation Army. Concerning the causes that led to this, it is their united wish that nothing should be said that would interrupt the good feeling that has always existed, and still exists between them and thousands of their old and dearly loved comrades in that organization.
There are those who have misjudged the Maréchale in this matter, as having taken this step for personal advantage, and without due regard to its effect on her father and his work. How little do they know the truth. To one who has read the correspondence of those days, and all other days since, who has watched within the inner circle of the home, overhearing the most confidential conversations, nothing could be so shocking a contravention of the truth as to accuse this devoted daughter either of parental disregard, or self-willed unconcern for the welfare of the Kingdom of Christ. This step cost heart's blood to the Maréchale.
"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.
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.