Catherine Booth
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Colonel Mildred Duff >> Catherine Booth
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Writing after one special strain of work and anxiety, she says:--
'The excitement made me worse than I have been for two years. My heart
was really alarming, and for two days I could hardly bear any clothes to
touch me. This has disheartened me again as to my condition. But God
reigns, and He will keep me alive as long as He needs me.'
Another of her hindrances, and one which was almost more difficult to
overcome than weakness of body, was depression.
I wonder if you know what that is? If so, it will help you to realize
that Mrs. Booth had to fight it also.
The Devil seemed allowed to try and test her faith to the uttermost, and
at times to blot out all peace and glory from her soul. During one such
time of darkness she writes:--
'I know I ought not, of all saints, or sinners either, to be depressed. I
know it dishonours my Lord, grieves His Spirit, and injures me greatly;
and I would fain hide from everybody to prevent their seeing it. But I
cannot help it. I have struggled hard, more than any one knows, for a
long time against it. Sometimes I have literally held myself, head and
heart and hand, and waited for the floods to pass over me.'
But our Army Mother did not give up working for God, and sit down in
despair, because she was thus tried. One day, just before leaving for a
great West-End Meeting, in which God made her words as a sharp two-edged
sword, she wrote this to one of her children:--
'I have been very much depressed since you left--more so than usual. It
is of no use reasoning with myself when these fits of despondency are on
me. I must hold on and fight my passage through; and when I get to Heaven
the light and joy will be all the greater. If I dared give up working I
should do so a hundred times over; but I _dare_ not.'
Another and constant hindrance which our Army Mother had to fight for the
greater part of her life was poverty. It was so difficult, many times, to
make two ends meet. She had, during many years of her life, no regular
money coming in on which to depend, and during that time it was a
constant struggle to have her children properly cared for and give them
the needed education.
But most of all did our Army Mother show herself a warrior in her own
Salvation campaigns. In those early days there were no praying Soldiers
and Sergeants to be had to deal with the penitents--no one, either, to
lead her singing, scarcely even to keep the doors or take up the
collection. She would arrive in a town absolutely alone. A hall had been
taken in which she was to speak, and she would hire a tiny lodging, or
stay in whatever home would receive her, and set to work. We can scarcely
understand the loneliness of her position. Here was a proof of her mighty
faith in God.
She began these solitary campaigns when her sixth child was but a few
weeks old, and God most wonderfully owned her labours. At one place she
saw one hundred grown-up people and two hundred children come to her
penitent-form in six days. But it was a fearful battle.
'I have a comfortable little cot to stay in,' she writes to her mother
from one such battle-field, 'very small and humble; but it is clean and
quiet; and when I feel nervous no one knows the value of quietness. I
have felt it hard work lately. Many a time have I longed to be where the
weary are at rest.'
At Margate, some years later, she commenced her Meetings without knowing
a single person in the place. For some weeks she had not even a helper in
the Prayer Meetings, nor one who would give out a song for her. Mrs.
Booth could not sing herself, and there was often an awkward pause before
any one would be willing to pitch her tune. 'If only,' she said when The
Army was fairly on its feet, 'I had been able to command a dozen reliable
people such as I could have anywhere now, I think I could have done
almost anything.'
Even more wonderful was her experience at Brighton.
The Dome, a great building holding three thousand people, had been taken
for her Meetings.
'I can never forget my feelings,' says this Soldier-saint, 'as I stood
upon the platform and looked upon the people, realizing that among them
all there was no one to help me. When I commenced the Prayer Meeting, for
which I should think quite nine hundred remained, Satan said to me, as I
came down from the platform according to my custom, "You will never ask
such people as these to come and kneel down here? You will only make a
fool of yourself if you do." I felt stunned for a moment; but I answered,
"Yes, I shall. I shall not make it any easier for them than for the
others. If they do not realize their sins enough to be willing to come
and kneel here, they will not be of much use to the kingdom."'
The Lord set His seal upon Mrs. Booth's faith and courage, for the first
to volunteer were two old gentlemen, both over seventy years of age; and
she had ten or twelve at the mercy-seat before the Meeting ended.
Writing from Portsmouth, she tells the same story of loneliness and
victory:--
'You say, "How do you get on personally?" Oh, I never was so hampered for
help in every way in all my life! The most able man I have keeps a
milliner's shop, and the one that opens for me generally is an overseer;
so their attention is divided and the time limited. Pray for me. I never
needed your prayers so much. This is a dreadfully wicked place.'
Yet during the seventeen weeks of her stay some six hundred names were
taken, many of them wonderful trophies of God's mercy.
Having lived such a warrior's life, you think, very likely, that the
death-bed experience of our Army Mother would be all peace and glory. But
no. Right down into the Valley she needed to use the Sword of the Spirit
and the Shield of Faith, for to the last Satan was allowed to test and
try her.
But she fought on!
'One of my hardest lessons,' she said in her last hours, 'has been the
difference between faith and realization; and if I have had to conquer
all through life by naked faith, I can only expect it to be the same now.
All our enemies have to be conquered by _faith_, not realization;
and is it not so with the last enemy, death? Yes, if it please the Lord
that I should go down into the dark valley without any realization,
simply knowing that I am His, and He is mine, I am quite willing--I
accept it.'
This is the faith that made our Army Mother and all the Bible saints such
conquerors. It is the secret of their victory--the faith without which it
is impossible to please God, and for which we all need to pray, 'Lord,
increase our faith.'
XI
LAST DAYS
'As I look back on life I do not remember the houses I have lived in, the
people that I have known, the things of passing interest at the moment.
They are all gone. There is nothing stands out before my mind as of any
consequence, but the work I have done for God and Eternity.'--MRS.
BOOTH.
If The General and those who loved our Army Mother best had been able to
choose for her, they would most likely have said: 'Let her live and fight
and work on, up to within a few days of her promotion to Glory. Let the
call come quickly and painlessly, as it has come to others in our ranks.'
But the Lord, who loved her more than we did, saw fit to send to her two
and a half years of ever-increasing weariness and suffering. For long
months she lay on the very bank of the River, longing for the messenger
of Death to carry her across. Those who loved her could not tell why the
Lord sent her this last fiery trial; they could only bow with her, and
say, 'Thy will be done.'
It was in February, 1888, that Mrs. Booth, who was anxious about her
health, went to consult a great doctor and get his opinion. She was
alone, for no one had thought her illness was so serious. She asked him
to tell her the truth--all through her life, as you know, she wanted the
truth; and after a little hesitation he told her.
The truth was the saddest that she could hear. That dreadful illness--
cancer--through which she had so tenderly nursed her own dear mother,
had come to her, and in the doctor's opinion she had much suffering to
pass through, and only two or, at the most, three years longer to live.
Mrs. Booth listened calmly, thanked the doctor, and then, getting once
more into the cab, drove home all alone.
It was a dark journey. The War needed her. The General needed her. Her
children needed her. And yet the sentence of Death had been passed upon
her, and she must soon leave them all. What did she do? I think you can
guess.
She knelt down in the cab, and in prayer committed to God, in a new and
deeper way than ever before, her own body, and her dear ones and the work
He had given her to do.
At last the cab stopped before her own door, and The General came out to
meet her.
'I shall never forget that meeting in this world, or the next,' he says.
'I had been watching for the cab, and had run out to meet her and help
her up the steps. She tried to smile on me through her tears; but,
drawing me into the room, soon told me, bit by bit, what the doctor had
said. I sat down speechless. She rose from her seat, and came and knelt
beside me, saying: "Do you know what was my first thought? That I should
not be there to nurse you in your last hour."
'I was stunned. I felt as if the whole world were coming to a standstill.
Opposite me, on the wall, was a picture of Christ on the cross. I thought
I could understand it then, as never before. She talked to me like an
angel; she talked as she had never talked before. I could say little or
nothing. I could only kneel with her and try to pray. That very same
night The General was to leave London for some great Meetings in Holland,
and Mrs. Booth would not hear of his changing his plans and remaining
with her.
'The War must go on' was her thought, even when all her family stood
stunned and heart-broken around her, unwilling to leave her even for a
moment.
Two years later, when but a few more days of suffering remained to her, a
last message from her lips reached us as Self-Denial Week began. 'The War
must go on' was one of its sentences.
'The War must go on' had been as her motto, lived out in all the long,
long months that lay between. Instead of immediately laying aside her
work, when the doctors gave their dreadful judgment, and beginning to
think only of herself, she went on with it as long as her increasing
weakness allowed.
But step by step the disease grew worse. First she was forced to give up
Meetings and public work. Then it became impossible for her to use her
right hand, and she was therefore obliged to give up her correspondence,
though she still continued to dictate her letters, and learnt also to
write with her left hand.
Soon her daily drives became too tiring, and by and by she went out of
the house into the little garden for the last time; and then for the
concluding twelve months of her life she was a prisoner in her room,
lying in constant suffering.
But during these long months the greatest joy and relief that could come
to her was to hear of some fresh victory or triumph for the Kingdom of
Jesus. Her interest in The Army and her love for the people were as keen
as ever, and War Councils were held and new developments planned in her
chamber, and much of The General's Darkest England Scheme for the poor
and outcast was thought out and decided upon beside her sick bed.
Again and again, too, Mrs. Booth would receive deputations of Officers of
different classes and from various countries in which The Army was at
work, who came to Clacton-on-Sea, where the last fifteen months of her
life were spent, to listen to her words of advice and inspiration.
There were no Corps Cadets in those days; but our Army Mother left some
specially beautiful words about the Juniors, to which I must refer.
When she was told by the Officer then in charge of our Junior Work in
England that the children loved and prayed continually for her, she
smiled.
'The thought of the little ones,' says some one who was there, 'brought
our beloved Army Mother wholly out of herself and her pain and
weariness.'
'A very choice branch of the work,' she said. 'I have often told Emma
that I hoped when I was too old for public work God would let me end
where I began--with the children. But it seems that it is not to be so.'
'Give the children,' she went on, in reply to the messages they had sent,
'my dear love, and tell them that if there had been a Salvation Army when
I was ten I should have been a Soldier then, as I am to-day.
Never allow yourself to be discouraged in your work. I know you must meet
with many discouragements; but I am sure the Spirit of God works mightily
on little children long before grown people think they are able to
understand.'
Again and again during that last year of awful suffering it seemed as if
Mrs. Booth were about to leave us; but then she would revive, and come
back to endure more weeks and months of agony.
But at last, on October 4, 1890, all could see that she was on the brink
of the River, and even those who loved her the most tenderly could not
wish to hold her back.
'O Emma, let me go, darling,' she whispered; and hearing the reply, 'Yes,
we will, we will,' she said, 'Now! Yes, Lord, come, Oh, come!'
The singing of The Army songs seemed to comfort her; and once she raised
her suffering arm, and pointed to the text, '_My grace is sufficient
for thee_,' which hung on the wall. It was lifted down and placed at
the foot of her bed, so that her eyes could often rest on it during those
last hours.
'Soon after noon,' says the present General, 'I felt that the deepening
darkness of the Valley was closing around my dear mother, and a little
later I took my last farewell. Her lips moved, and she gave me one look
of unspeakable tenderness and trust which will live with me for ever.
Again we sang:--
My mistakes His free grace doth cover,
My sins He doth wash away;
These feet which shrink and falter
Shall enter the Gates of Day.
And, holding her hand, The General gave her up to God. It was a solemn
and wonderful scene.'
The Chief of the Staff and Mrs. Bramwell Booth, Mrs. Booth-Tucker, and
the Commander, and her three daughters, Marian, Eva, and Lucy, knelt
round the bed, upon which were placed photographs of the other members of
her family who were unavoidably absent. Near to her stood her faithful
nurse, Captain Carr, and others of the household, the dear General bowing
over his beloved wife and companion in life's long strife, and giving her
up to the keeping of the Father.
One by one the members of the family tenderly embraced her; then a gleam
of recognition passed over the brightening countenance as The General
bent over her. Their eyes met---the last kiss of love on earth, the last
word till the Morning, and without a movement the breathing gently
ceased, and a warrior laid down her sword to receive her crown.
* * * * *
You may have heard of those wonderful days from Tuesday morning till
Sunday night, when the coffin containing the precious remains of our Army
Mother lay at the Congress Hall, Clapton, and when more than fifty
thousand people came to have a last look at her dear face.
A piece of glass had been let into the plain oak coffin. It was just
large enough to show the head and shoulders, and she lay as if in a sweet
sleep.
You wonder if many came merely from curiosity. Some did, of course, but
most of the people came because her life and example and words had been
so blessed to their souls; and they came as they would come to look at
the dead face of their own mother. It was the most wonderful tribute to a
woman's life and words that London had ever seen.
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.'
Then all who had made the covenant from their hearts rose and sang
together:--
Just as I am Thou dost receive,
Dost welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve,
Because Thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come!
It was just such an ending to the wonderful service as our Army Mother
would have chosen had she been still on earth with us.
* * * * *
The next morning was dry and bright. 'I shall ask God to give you a fine
day for my funeral, Emma, so that you mayn't take cold,' our Army Mother
had said, for she was ever thoughtful for others; and her prayer was
answered, for though the white mist crept up from the river to the
Embankment, where the procession was forming up, there was no rain nor
wind.
Tens of thousands of our dear Soldiers would gladly have sacrificed a
day's work in order to follow in the funeral procession of one they so
dearly loved; but, so as not to gather too large a crowd, only Officers
were allowed in the march, which passed through countless throngs of
people from International Headquarters to Abney Park Cemetery, a distance
of about five miles.
All along the route the crowds stood in dense masses, and roofs, windows,
and every nook and corner were packed with human beings. Nothing had been
seen like it, said the police, since the Duke of Wellington's funeral,
forty years before.
It was a wonderful march. I wish you could have seen it! Sometimes it
seemed as if every one was weeping; and when the open hearse, with its
plain oak coffin, crowned by The Army bonnet and well-worn Bible, passed,
all heads were bared, all voices hushed, and tears filled all eyes.
The General, standing alone in his open carriage all along the long, sad
way, must have felt that he had the people's sympathy and love with him
in his grief, for scores of heartfelt 'God bless you's!' came from lips
that are unused to such words.
And at last the yellow evening sun shone out as the great procession
reached the gates of Abney Park Cemetery and wound towards the open
grave.
Only a part of the mighty throng could hear The General's beautiful
words, so strong and yet so tender, from which I have already quoted, but
all joined in the song, 'Rock of Ages,' which seemed to roll up to the
heavens themselves.
Several leading Officers and members of The General's own family prayed
and spoke, wonderfully upheld in spite of their deep grief and the strain
of the last days. And then by the open grave the present General led all
hearts to make a fresh consecration, the whole assembly promising, with
God's help, that they would be
'Faithful to Thee, faithful to one another, and faithful to a dying
world, till we meet our beloved Mother in the Morning. Amen.'
* * * * *
If ever you are in Abney Park Cemetery you should visit her grave. It is
very simple. Around the little piece of earth runs a grey stone, with
these words carved on it:--
CATHERINE BOOTH,
MOTHER OF THE SALVATION ARMY
More than Conqueror, through Him that loved us,
and gave Himself for all the world and for you.
Do you also follow Christ?
and above are two small beds of flowers.
Do many people go to see it? you wonder.
Oh, yes. All round it a path is worn in the grass, made by the tread of
many feet; for mothers bring their boys and girls to see it, and tell
them what a mother she was, and men and women of all creeds and races
pause beside it, and remember.
Many Officers, too--from distant lands, and speaking strange tongues you
could not understand--come to The Army Mother's grave when they visit our
shores. For she was their Mother as well as ours, they say.
They kneel beside the stone, and spell out the name, and then they
consecrate themselves afresh to God and the needs of the heathen lands,
and they claim His grace to follow in her steps.
For our Army Mother is not dead. True, her body lies in the quiet grave
at Abney Park, and her spirit is in Heaven; but her life and influence
still live among us, her words are treasured, and our greatest prayer and
desire for the girls and wives and mothers in our ranks is that they may
live to be worthy daughters of Catherine Booth.
DATES IN MRS. BOOTH'S LIFE
1829. January 17th. Catherine Mumford born at Ashbourne, Derby.
1829. April 10th. William Booth born at Nottingham.
1843. Catherine has to leave school owing to severe illness.
1844. Refuses to be engaged to her cousin.
1845. Is converted.
1846. Seems likely to go into consumption.
1850. Takes Sunday class of elder girls.
1851. June. Miss Mumford hears Mr. Booth preach; later meets him at a
friend's house.
1852. May 15th. They are engaged to be married.
1855. June 16th. The wedding.
1857. Mrs. Booth speaks to a children's meeting on Temperance.
1859. She starts work among drunkards. She writes her first pamphlet on
woman's right to preach.
1860. Mrs. Booth speaks for the first time in public.
1861. Mr. and Mrs. Booth break up their home in the north, and come to
London, choosing an evangelistic life.
1864. Mrs. Booth begins to hold Evangelistic campaigns apart from her
husband.
1864. July. East End Mission begun.
1868. First Headquarters established.
1869. Mrs. Booth's wonderful Brighton campaign.
1870. East London Mission becomes the 'Christian Mission.'
1871. Mrs. Booth publishes her first book.
1877. Christian Mission becomes 'The Salvation Army.'
1878. The uniform is chosen.
1886. First Self-Denial Week.
1888. February. Mrs. Booth learns that she is suffering from cancer.
1888. June 21st. Mrs. Booth speaks in public for the last time (at the
City Temple).
1889. August. She goes to Clacton-on-Sea.
1890. October 4th. Mrs. Booth is promoted to Glory.
1890. October 6th. Her body brought to Congress Hall, Clapton.
1890. October 11th. Funeral at Abney Park.
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