The meeting being thrown open, the doctrine of holiness--God's power to keep His children from sinning--first came up, and was violently attacked by several pastors who confounded it with perfectionism. Their remarks were loudly applauded, and one lady screamed above the rest--
"Let him that is without sin get up and testify."
Greatly daring, the Maréchale whispered to a comrade who sat beside her, "Rise, Bisson," which he did, and in a few simple words testified, not indeed to his own perfection, but to God's power to sanctify and keep as well as justify.
After a momentary lull, the storm became fiercer than ever, and the ministry of women was now the cause of war. The Maréchale alluded to her mother's manifesto on the subject.
"We have read it," said a lady, "and we do not agree with it. Women are meant for the home. They are commanded to be silent in the churches."
"Besides," cried another, "you are not old enough."
The Maréchale quoted the words, "Let no man despise thy youth."
"But that," retorted a pastor's wife, "was said to a man."
Thereupon the babel of voices became deafening.
"Pretty and prepossessing girls," a matron was heard to say, "should not show themselves in public."
"If you do speak," said a pastor, skilled in distinctions, "you should speak to women only, and not before men."
All through the storm the central figure was quiet and self-possessed. But she was thinking hard. The idea of a distinction in sex had never come before her as a speaker; it was new and strange to her. When she at length spoke again, she put the result of her thinking into a simple, memorable, unanswerable dictum:
Perhaps somebody had said the same thing before, but it was none the less original on her part. Then she expanded the truth:
"The needs of a man's soul are the same as a woman's, and vice versa. You do not get up and say there are so many men and so many women in a meeting. They all need salvation, pardon, purity, peace; all the gifts and graces of the Spirit are for men and women alike. Of course," she continued, "if any woman is so light and frivolous that she makes such a distinction, that certainly proves that she has no vocation to be an evangelist, and I should send her home by the next train."