"Then Calvary is the greatest fiasco the world has ever seen."
Stretching out his hand, he said, "Oh, madame, do not say that; it is blasphemy."
"But, my father, we are in the presence of facts, not fancies. You have left what men prize most. You have lived up to your light. And what do I find? Torment instead of rest, conflict instead of assurance, bondage instead of deliverance. Surely, my father, Jesus did not come to increase our burdens, but to relieve them. You remember His word, 'Come unto me and I will give you rest.' He said, 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.' Are these theories to be preached in pulpits, or are they realities?"
By this time they stood on the summit of the hill, and she said--
"You are going to preach to-night, _mon père_?"
"Would you like that we should go down the hill together and resume our conversation?"
He preached one of the best sermons she had ever heard, partly inspired, she could not help thinking, by their intimate talk. As the congregation moved out, she stepped into a Confessional box to wait for him. She saw him turning this way and that with a look of disappointment, and, stepping out, said to him--
They began to descend the hill together. "My father," she said, "I greatly enjoyed your sermon. But how can you show others the way of deliverance if you have not found it yourself? How can you unbind if you are not unbound? How can you heal if you are not healed? How, my father? Do you not see that all this is only from the head, not from the life, the heart?"
"It is true! But I try, oh, my God, I try!"
"But it does not come in that way--by our struggles."
"Then how?" he exclaimed in a tone of despair.
"Does He not say, 'Abide in me, and ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you'? Does not St. Paul testify, 'I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.' How many have given praise to Him who is 'able to save to the uttermost' and 'able to present us faultless'! Put Him to the proof. If any one has the right to salvation, surely you have."
They paused under a tree in the stillness of evening, and, while he stood with bowed head, she knelt beside him and prayed.
Early in 1887 the Maréchale became the wife of Mr. Arthur Sydney Clibborn, an Irish gentleman of Quaker extraction, lineally descended from Barclay of Ury, the hero of one of Whittier's finest poems. Brought up in Bessbrook, which was called the model town from the fact that there was no public-house, police barracks or pawnshop in it, he renounced excellent business prospects in answer to a call which first came to him through a simple, earnest Quaker minister, "Sydney, will thee not come with us?" The visit of some representatives of Salvationism to Bessbrook turned the current of his thoughts in a new direction, making him exclaim, "Here is primitive Quakerism, primitive Wesleyanism, primitive Christianity!" As he had spent some years at school in Switzerland, and become proficient in French and German, he was sent by General Booth to assist the Maréchale in France, and acted as her chief of staff until their marriage.