"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."
The truths by which she lived came to her intuitively. Her religion did not consist of commandments and dogmas. It was life, light, liberty, and above all love. Alike in what she accepted and what she rejected, she acted instinctively—she could do no other. She had an aversion to religious controversy. Arguments made little or no impression upon her mind. She might sometimes be overwhelmed with theological doctrines, the truth of which she could neither affirm nor deny, but in the end she would emerge with the naïve remark, "I am a very simple child, and I must have a child's religion." She always held that Christ's religion is for the multitude, and that the multitude are children. The essence of Christianity can be assimilated by boys and girls who do not know how to read and write, and they may become saints and saviours. A glance at the Maréchale's well-used Bible suffices to prove that for her the heart of the Old Testament is in Hosea, the prophet of love, and Isaiah the prophet of atonement, while the heart of the New Testament is in the story of the returning prodigal or the penitent Magdalene.
Genius is never easy to understand. Its weakness is often related to its strength. It has what the French call the defects of its qualities. A great part of the Maréchale's power certainly lay in her childlike humility. As a soul-winner she never gave the impression of condescending. She did not need to stoop; by nature and by grace she was meek and lowly in heart. What drew multitudes of poor sinners to her was their assurance that she would hear with human sympathy their tales of sin and sorrow. At one of her midnight suppers a French lady said to her, "I have been here all these years trying to bring these poor girls together. How is it that you succeed where I fail, in getting them to open their hearts to you?"
"Perhaps," said the Maréchale, "it is because I do not make them feel that there is a difference between them and me."
With her humility there was bound up a certain measure of self-distrust. In her, as in her father, whom she resembled so strongly in spirit as well as in features, there was an extraordinary combination of confidence and diffidence. It used to be said by those who knew the General most intimately that, while he commanded an Army, he was apologetic to his cook. And if the Maréchale had a splendid moral courage, as her manner of dealing with hostile crowds abundantly proved, she had also a womanly timidity in which there lay a certain subtle danger. So long as she had faith in her God-given instincts, and in the individual guidance of the Holy Spirit, she was unconquerable, but if anything undermined them her power was for the time being paralysed. For the criticisms of the world she cared little or nothing, but the real love and understanding of her comrades was as the breath of life to her. From them she was always eager to learn, and sometimes she let the judgment of others obscure her spiritual and womanly intuitions.