Her children had starvation staring them in the face; another terrible illness, brought on by household care, laid her low; her spirit was exhausted by the torturing strain of years; and she could hold out no longer. In a "blind faith, without conviction," she was received into Zion Church. Broken on the wheel of life, stretched too long upon the rack of this tough world, she accepted—like Savonarola and Galileo, like Cranmer and Jeanne d'Arc—an alien creed, without her reason being convinced or her heart won.

But—again like those—not for long. Her deliverance came in a startling fashion. Soon after her removal with her family to Paris, her husband began to suffer from the effects of a neglected influenza which settled in his knee. True to his principles, he refused to see a doctor. When he was at the brink of death, the Maréchale brought in a physician in the guise of a friend. The sick man's case was at first pronounced to be hopeless, but three of the finest surgeons of Paris were hastily summoned, performed four operations, and saved his life, leaving him, however, crippled for the rest of his days.

The dismissal of Mr. Booth-Clibborn followed as a matter of course. He had violated the strictest laws of Zion by accepting the aid of surgery. Two of his own converts, now followers of Dr. Dowie, invaded the sick room, and handed him the fateful document. Some time afterward he wrote: "Dowie was a good man at one time. So was the devil. Dowie fell through the same sin—Pride." In addition to a statement which was published in four countries, he has recently borne the following conclusive testimony: "The Maréchale would never have had anything to do with Dr. Dowie but for me. When she came near him it was on every occasion unwillingly. She suffered unutterable anguish, pain and grief, from the fact that from the first all her instincts, as well as the consciousness of her true religious interest, were against Dr. Dowie's spiritual personality, his ways, his claims, his style of government. If, in a kind of despair, she went with me into it, though she was in it she was not of it. It was never sought, it was endured. The only comfort in the enduring was the possibility of doing a little good meanwhile to people in it, and of ultimately helping in the opening of my eyes."

CHAPTER XV

SURSUM CORDA!

All the Maréchale's hearers remember her penetrating gaze. No one ever encountered her eyes and saw them shift. Thousands have felt as if she were looking through all disguises into their very souls, and her tapering index finger has often made the bravest quail. "All through the night," wrote a convicted sinner, "I saw her finger pointing straight at me." And one feels certain that her look was never more direct, never more searching, than when it was turned inward. She has always had a passion for seeing things as they are, especially the things of the spirit.

We are not surprised, therefore, at her often repeated words: "This experience has taught me the folly of violating God-given instinct, and allowing the inner light of God's Holy Spirit to be darkened by man. When I compare myself with what I was in the past, in many respects it seems as if that person was dead!"

Drawn by the cords of love, held by ties too sacred to be broken, worn by years of poverty and sickness, and moving at last in a kind of trance, more dead than alive, one of God's truest and bravest servants blindly stumbled on till she found herself, for a time of agony, in a spiritual prison-house from which there seemed to be no escape.

Her greatest danger lay in a kind of fatalistic submission, which would have meant permanent disloyalty to her own ideals and convictions, as well as the abandonment of her vocation. She read the letters of Père Didon, whose heroic acceptance of his destiny influenced her in the direction of sinking her individuality. And one cannot understand the exquisite torture of her position unless one realises that her mind had often been made an arena of conflict between the apparently irreconcilable claims of the domestic and the apostolic life. And yet, Father Hyacinth once said to her in Paris, "You are the only woman I have ever met who has reconciled the vocation of a mother with that of an apostle." It may be appropriate to say here that the prayers of both father and mother have been answered in the conversion of their ten children, who have of their own free will consecrated themselves to the service of Christ. Four sons and three daughters are already engaged in active evangelistic work, and have been used of God for the conversion of many souls.

To bring the Maréchale back to liberty, God used the voices of nature, of children and of friends.