This book consists of a few sections from a life which, like Mrs. Browning's pomegranate, "shows within a heart blood-tinctured." To a heart of love add a spirit of fire, and you have the Maréchale. Blood and fire--that is what she was at the beginning, and that is what she will be to the end. One has often heard her say that she has never been more in her element than when, on entering some town, she has found herself confronted, in a theater or casino, by "all the devils of the place." She is happy whenever "Jesus is going to have a chance for a night." In the natural course of things her greatest battles are still before her. England has need of her, France perhaps still greater need. May it be long before the Maréchale reaches her last campaign! Meanwhile the old battle-cry, _En Avant!_
The subject of this sketch--written during a brief respite from other work--is at present far away, but I know that what she desires to give to the world is a sense of the Divine, the miracle-working power which rewards a child-like faith, and that she will be glad if every reader closes the book with a _Gloire à Dieu!_
(_From a drawing by Edward Clifford, exhibited in the Royal Academy and presented to Mrs. Booth_)
(_From the painting of Baron Cederström_)
(_From a photo taken in Paris, circa 1890_)
In the summer of 1865 William Booth, Evangelist, found his life-work. For some time back his imagination had been more than usually active. He could not help thinking that all his past efforts had been but tentative solutions of a difficult problem. He felt the spur of a vague discontent. He seemed to be groping his way towards an unrealised ideal. At length he got the inner light he needed. While he was conducting a series of meetings in a tent pitched on the disused Quaker burying-ground at Baker's Row, Whitechapel, he saw his heavenly vision and heard his divine call. He accepted a mission which was no less real than those of Hebrew Prophets and Christian Apostles. The words in which he describes his vocation form part of the history of Christianity in England. "I found my heart," he says, "strongly and strangely drawn out on behalf of the million people living within a mile of the tent, ninety out of every hundred of whom, they told me, never heard the sound of the preacher's voice from year to year. 'Here is a sphere!' was being whispered continually in my inward ear by an inward voice ... and I was continually haunted with a desire to offer myself to Jesus Christ as an apostle for the heathen of East London. The idea or heavenly vision or whatever you may call it overcame me; I yielded to it; and what has happened since is, I think, not only my justification, but an evidence that my offer was accepted."