For all kinds of people came–rich and poor, good and bad, people of many different religions, and many with no religion at all. Working men came in their dinner-hour, with their tools on their backs and tears in their eyes; mothers lifted up their little children to look at the one who had taught them the way of life; and, best of all, by the side of her coffin knelt many a wanderer and backslider to give themselves afresh to God.
More than one poor girl went direct from the Congress Hall to the Rescue Homes, to begin to live ‘as she would have wished’; and the Cadets on guard were all the time dealing with drunkards and helping those who desired to begin from thenceforth to live a new and different life.
Even to-day, twenty-four years later, we often meet those who date their conversion, or their first step in the Narrow Way, from their look at that face lying in its simple coffin.
One of Mrs. Booth’s own grandchildren, Mary, the present General’s second daughter, looks back to that scene as the time when God in an unmistakable manner sealed her as His. She was only five years old as she knelt by the coffin, but nevertheless she decided there, in her childish consecration, like Ruth of old, that ’Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’; and in the spirit of this consecration she lives to-day.
In order that some of the crowds who wished to share in the funeral service might be present, the largest hall in London, the Olympia, was taken. Twenty-six thousand people filled it; and though it was, of course, impossible for them all to hear, they followed the service given on printed papers with reverent sympathy.
The coffin was carried down the immense hall by Officers; The General and his family followed.
Those who arranged for this last mighty gathering remembered that Mrs. Booth, when with us, was never happy to leave a Meeting unless it had been brought to a point, and something definite had been done; and therefore, when the songs and prayers and readings were over, the huge crowd was asked to kneel and make a solemn covenant with God.
It was a beautiful covenant, and ended with these words:–
’And now, in this solemn hour, and in the presence of death, I come again to Thy footstool, and make this covenant with Thee.’