These are biographies that were in the files of E.F. & L. Harvey. They have been gleaned over many years and from various sources. The language is often antiquated but the facts speak for themselves.

Armelle

ARMELLE

Armelle was born in 1696, the daughter of George Nicolas, at Campenac in France. The family was poor and every child had to work as soon as able. Armelle sought service in a neighboring town and was much appreciated because of her hard work.
She was unable to read or write, but others read to her. Once, the whole story of the Passion was read to her. “This had an indescribable effect on Armelle who had hitherto known no details at all, only that the Savior had been crucified. Her mind seized on one event after another, her whole soul melted in grief and love, for she seemed to hear interiorly the words: ‘it was love that caused Him to suffer thus.’ . . .One alone filled her horizon, Jesus. Deep repentance and a hatred against all sin filled her heart which at the same time overflowed with the desire to serve Him and to suffer something for Him.”


She had very real struggles with the powers of darkness, but God brought her through. Her mistress at another place of work was very cruel to her, insisting that she keep on working in spite of her ill-health. She endured much ill-treatment, without any complaint or endeavor to explain how ill she felt.
“It seemed to me,” she said, “my sufferings were nothing to what I desired to suffer following the example of Christ. His image was ever before my eyes; as He was instructing me inwardly as a teacher and I was listening to His voice as a pupil, always seeking to learn from Him, I scarcely took heed of how I was treated outwardly. I was shut in with myself; I held on to the divine Love, and did not lose sight of His presence. I conversed with Him, rejoiced to suffer a little for Him, and asked Him for a measure of that patience He showed in His own earthly Life.”
The following sayings are from her biography:
“During my work I talk with Him as with a friend, I love Him and rejoice in Him. Even when my work demands my whole attention my heart is always turned to Him. When the work is finished I hurry back to Him. He taught me that as long as I looked toward Him I should not sin, nor cease to love Him. He gave me a greater desire to fulfill my duties as a domestic servant than to enjoy meditation and prayer. Indeed, I found Him much better at my work than at the wrong time in church. To keep to my converse with God was my real and ceaseless, as it were my only duty, within or beneath all other duties. . . .
“When I consider the great advantages of being a servant I cannot cease to praise God for making me one. No other state in the world would be so dear to me. I can live in it quietly without any taking note of me. Who would think of paying respect to a poor servant? Anyone may rebuke her, look down on her, find fault with what she does or says. Is not that the most excellent school of humility? In what other state could one learn so well? For this reason should not all servants consider themselves fortunate? When servants complain to me of the very things which should help them, I am astonished; I say in my mind, if only you knew how salutary it is to be blamed and despised and kept strictly you would rejoice instead of grieving! But how few know the blessedness of suffering with Christ in being rejected of men and having to bear their contempt.”
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Bannister, Catherine

Colonel Yuddha Bai

(Catherine Bannister)
(1888-1910)

Influenced by the Army Mother, Catherine Bannister, a lady of culture, became a Salvationist in 1887. In the following year she entered The Army’s Missionary Field in India, where, for twenty-two years, she continued a brave and triumphant fight. She pioneered and developed Army operations in the Marathi country, and later had an important charge in the Punjab. The Colonel entered intimately into the life and habits of the people, and was possessed of quite a remarkable facility in acquiring languages. She “died at her post” whilst engaged on the translation of Army songs for her beloved Marathis.


The Salvation Army during the first ten or even twenty years of its life was simply a campaigning force. Out of the depths of the will of God, it sprang into being, and, looking out upon the millions of souls held captive by the Devil, it attacked the strongholds of sin and released the captives. It attacked again and conquered, and, turning its prisoners of war into Soldiers, still pressed forward.
The essential qualities of the Staff Officer of that period were those of the Crusader—entire self-sacrifice, courage, decision, action, mobility, and the determination to win through or die. Men and women of such spirit responded to the Founder’s call to arms, and rallied to his standard, prepared for poverty, weariness and early death if they might but share in setting up the kingdom of righteousness.
Victories continued to crown the arms of this Army of Salvation and a different order arose. The acquired Territory needed organizing, administering; the welfare of the conquered called for consideration; the family, the children, the aged, the poor, the untrained, needed care and guidance. Departments to deal with these new responsibilities came into being, and Officers of parts differing from those of the pioneer—the organizer, the administrator, the manager, the teacher, the musician, the doctor, the nurse, and besides, the man for the records and the writings, were required.
As the quality of the conquest in the front lines depended upon the character of the attacker, so the quality of the kingdom forming behind the lines depended upon the character of the builders to whom this important work was entrusted. If the attackers settled down to the comforts and usages of peace time, their successes were feeble, and if the administrators who are removed from the smoke of the battle and the muck of the trenches, lost vision, lived softly, or became perfunctory in their spirit and work, the fiber of their kingdom-building deteriorated.
Paul, in his day, realized the inevitability of various conditions of life and service, and spoke concerning them to the Corinthians, “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit, and there are differences of administrations but the same Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all and in all.” Lest one section of his Officers should misunderstand another, Paul used the illustration of the body composed of its various members, adding, “God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased Him.”
For a character typical of the Founder’s ideal as a leader of attack, it would be difficult to choose a better example than Catherine Bannister. From the first consecration of her life to Army service her abnegation was complete; her passion for souls, white-hot; her devotion to duty, absolute; her courage, without bounds; her faithfulness, to the end; her success, abundant. A sketch of her career is here presented, not so much as representing an all-round Officer—though there is every indication that she would have been successful in any branch of work to which she might have been appointed—but as an illustration of the spirit which should possess the Staff Officer whatever his work. Called to Missionary Service, she grasped the torch of Salvation and waved it, and waved it, and still chose to wave it, dispersing heathen darkness, until still clasping it she lay down to die.
Catherine Bannister, a daughter of the Church of England, was reared in an atmosphere unworldly and loyal in its love to the Lord Jesus. Her father, by profession a solicitor, provided her with the comforts of a refined home and gave her a sound education. Her invalid mother sowed in her daughter’s heart the seeds of righteousness, and by example and precept pointed the way of entire consecration to the service of God.
At the age of sixteen Catherine was converted. It was the custom of the family to have one of Spurgeon’s sermons read aloud at Sunday morning’s breakfast, and it was during one of these readings that the Heavenly vision shone clearly for Catherine, and with great certainty and joy she stepped out of nature’s darkness into the light of Grace.
For years hers was a hidden life, which moved in a narrow groove on account of her mother’s illness, for Catherine was her devoted nurse.
After her mother’s death, Catherine and her sister organized a mission in their village, employing lay-preachers for the public service whilst they busied themselves with the visitation of the sick, and such other ministrations as were, in those days, considered suitable for young ladies.
A winter in London introduced the sisters to The Salvation Army. This event changed the whole course of their lives. Accepting an invitation to attend a select gathering at which Mrs. Booth, The Army Mother, was to speak, the sisters found themselves listening to a solemn charge concerning the responsibility of believers for the Salvation of the unsaved. Life, after that Meeting, could never be the same to Catherine Bannister. Determined to see more of the Salvationists, she found out the Great Western Hall, and arrived in the vicinity one evening as the march was coming down Edgware Road. It was composed of poor people, and a hostile crowd jostled them as they marched singing songs of Salvation. Miss Bannister, walking on the footpath, was shaken by deep emotion as she realized that these people were bearing the shame and cross of Jesus in a way she was not prepared to accept.
The following Sunday morning found her at the Hall in time for the Holiness Meeting. When the march came in there were many bruised heads amongst the Soldiers, and much torn clothing, but radiant faces and an atmosphere of triumph. The call of the Meeting was for the presentation of bodies as well as souls to Christ, and Catherine Bannister’s mind was fully made up when, in the final dedication, she rose and yielded herself entirely to God.
Before returning to their village home, the sisters made another opportunity for hearing Mrs. Booth. On this occasion her message made plain the difference between workers and Soldiers. Catherine Banister had been an earnest worker, but now she saw sin entrenched against righteousness; she realized she must fight it and deliver the captives of the devil. In the “Call to Arms” at the conclusion of the Meeting she rose and covenanted with God to take, henceforward, open, active sides with Him in the Holy war. Obtaining an interview with Mrs. Booth, she asked what she should do. The Army Mother, divining that the Holy Spirit would be the best Counselor for this inquirer, simply replied: “Go right forward.”
Returning home, the sisters “opened fire” in the village street. The next Saturday night the Hall was full of roistering roughs of whose very existence the sisters had hitherto been ignorant. Souls were saved, and it is not surprising to chronicle that a few months later Miss Bannister asked Headquarters to take over her uniformed little Corps—which, incidentally, had been modeled after the dictates of the Regulations, and she and her sister entered Training for Officership.
At the time the Consul, then shortly to be married to Commissioner Booth-Tucker, was making up “The Wedding Fifty” for India, Captain Bannister was appointed to open Tring as a Garrison Corps. She arrived at the house, where was to be the Depot, while the workmen were still renovating; neither furniture nor supplies had arrived. But she carried in her baggage a small saucepan and a little tea, and gathering some shavings she boiled water and a pinch of tea, which—having no cup—she allowed to cool, and drank out of the saucepan; then, rolling herself in her traveling rug, she lay on the boards and went to sleep. The Captain described these pioneering experiences in a letter to a friend who was the Consul’s Secretary. The Consul knew Bannister—her consecration and ability, but here was a new characteristic. Surely a woman able to make fun out of unexpected hardships had qualities invaluable in a Missionary Officer. Catherine Bannister was included in “The Wedding Fifty” and received the Indian name Yuddha Bai—“Warrior Sister.”
Yuddha Bai’s first appointment in India was in charge of her comrade Officers during their training in native customs and the language study. She was also in charge of a Corps in Bombay.
These were trying days for the party of young Englishwomen. The heat, the mosquitoes (for there were few curtained beds in those days), the coarse native food, the difficult language, and the almost overpowering sense of the greatness of the work to which they had come, combined to test them—body, soul, and spirit. Yuddha Bai was a tower of strength to her comrades. She, who had enjoyed more comforts than others, put almost every comfort from her, and led the way along every new and difficult path. In study, she took three lessons a day to the others’ one—often sitting up far into the night with her feet in a pail of disinfectant to keep off the mosquitoes. Soon she was leading her Meetings in the vernacular, and buying the food from the bazaars for her large family. She led in adapting herself to the customs and manners of the people. She gloried in the native uniform, and the simple naturalness of Indian life. One large room sufficed for sleeping, dining, and study, with no furniture to keep in order, seeing the floor met the need of bed, table, and chairs, and left the time saved from housework for soul work.
She led on the march, her tender feet first treading the sharp stones and burning sands. She led in the face of a hostile native crowd, speaking until men listened to her message, and, when a flung stone cut open her face, she staunched the blood with the end of her sari and continued to deliver the message.
With such an example before them, it needed few words from Yuddha Bai to hold her sister comrades to a high consecration; but if one showed signs of flagging she would eye her quietly and say, “It was for this we came; if you can’t stand it you had better go home.” Little wonder that many of those women are still fighters on the Indian Field.
When “The Wedding Fifty” had acquired sufficient of the language to take appointments, they scattered to the four points of the compass. Staff-Captain Yuddha Bai was commissioned as Divisional Officer for Marathi villages, but she had to form her own Division. Her Headquarters, built in native style, was at Dhmari. A large room was used for general purposes, dining, interviews, and the lesser Meetings, and a smaller, eight feet by ten, was her own little sanctuary. It contained no furniture at all, just a raised mud platform which did duty for bed, chair, and desk, but it was the one corner to which she could retire from public gaze and for prayer, though for her greater prayer battles she was known to go further afield to meet with God alone.
We catch glimpses of those early days in letters written to her sister in England. The following describes the opening of her Headquarters:
“I am now settled in my new home. I think I told you that I have been put in charge of a village district, and some huts have been erected in a Central Village for the Divisional Staff. We did not move in as soon as we expected as the rains came before the roofs were on, washed the walls down again, soaked the floors and hindered and troubled us much. However, at last we got them fairly finished, made a push, and went in. The floors were very wet, and the roof not finished, but the Lord kept the rains off and we got very little harm.
“We are completely off the high road; there are no real roads to any of the villages, only wild mountain or jungle paths, or, at best, rough cart tracks. But our district is growing. We now have six Corps.”
Describing a “Boom March,” the method by which new villages were captured in those early days, she wrote:
“It was a most romantic time, and I have come home better in every way. There were forty-five of us. Eight lasses with myself. We were out nineteen days, visited twenty-three villages, opened nine Corps and two Districts, appointed eighteen Field and two District Officers, and saw 550 souls on their knees seeking Salvation. We marched altogether 150 miles.
“A party of pioneers went before us to prepare the villages for our coming. We would arrive in the evening, pitch our tent, and go straight into the Meeting, where we would find all the people assembled to hear us. The next morning we held another Meeting and sometimes left a party to do another night, then, if it seemed promising, we made it into a Corps and left two Officers to work it. We were on entirely new heathen ground, untouched by any previous effort, so our reception and success were very encouraging.
“We lasses slept in a tent, the men slept mostly under the trees. We had two small carts for our luggage—bedding, cooking utensils, tent, drum, food and clothes. Not much room for luggage for forty-five people, but we learn to do without here. Each was allowed two blankets, one change of clothing, Bible and Hymn Book; nothing else; but that was all we needed. Of course our food was of the coarsest, but what did that matter? We had two cooked meals in the day. One at 11a.m., consisting of rice, split peas, and onions. The other about 3 p.m., of tea and chappaties, a sort of pancake. Our worst enemy was cold; our hands and arms were cracked and bleeding at night, yet during the daytime it was scorching hot.”
God blessed this loving sacrifice, and as we have read, many souls were saved, and foundations laid which have proved to have been well laid. The most hopeful young men who felt called to Officership were brought into a Training Home, and Yudda Bai travailed in spirit to see Christ formed in them. Concerning the commissioning of her first batch of Cadets, she wrote:
“You can imagine what this means to me of joy and anxiety. I was anxious to improve the occasion as much as possible, so had a farewell tea with them, and afterwards a solemn consecration Meeting which lasted five hours. We had a grand time; the power of the Holy Ghost seemed to fall upon us. I prepared a Covenant which each newly-appointed Officer repeated aloud. It is something like this in Marathi. ‘I, ──, before God and my comrades, offer myself to God to be faithful in the work and responsibilities to which He has called me. Forsaking my own will I will daily do His will alone. For His sake I will gladly go into dark, sinful places to seek the lost and sin-defiled, and give them the message of Salvation. For their Salvation I will spend my life as a separated man. I will live apart from all worldly things, and will keep my thoughts, desires, power, time, affections, and members sacred, under the control of Jesus Christ. Though weak, yet in His strength, with my mind fixed on Him, and holding His hand, I believingly make this promise.’
“Seven of our present Cadets are Hindus; that means being completely cut off from parents, home, and friends. It is hard for them. They need more than leaders, they need affection in their temptations and sorrows, and if they fall one who does not too hastily condemn.”
The great yearning love which had taken possession of her heart for the Indian, shines through much of her writing, as for instance, to her sister:
“Were you here you would take up their cause as vehemently as we used to take up the ‘roughs’ in England, only more deservedly, for these Indians are superior in wit, devotion, eloquence, and every other good gift. If I could see the Flag of Calvary really established in the Marathi country, I think I would say, ‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.’”
She lived to see that day sooner than she expected, but when it arrived, she was not glad to depart. Her Division increased to a Territory within ten years. It was her intention never to leave India even for a furlough, but at last she received farewell orders, and by command of her General, turned her face homeward to rest.
After the refreshment of a stay amongst her own people, Yuddha Bai was appointed to the charge of the Punjab Territory and returned to (North) India. This move necessitated the learning of a new language, and Yuddha was then in middle life. But she gave herself to the task and not only succeeded in mastering Hindustani, but also the corrupted dialect of the villages. She was greatly pleased when she overheard some of her Soldiers discussing a difficulty, and adding, “We will go to the Colonel, she understands our tongue.”
In the beginning of her career Yuddha Bai’s sister comrades of less morale than she, stood in awe of her Spartan spirit, but constant contact with her Savior in ministry for the poor, the weak, and the dull, worked in her a wondrous tenderness and tolerance toward all, and while never to the last relaxing her personal rigorous self-denials, she became generous toward others. At one time her chief Divisional Commander—an English woman-comrade—had to confess that she had fallen in love and wished to link her life with that of “a continual comrade.” Yuddha Bai had carried her out of the battle to a little rest hut in the hills, and she chose the moment of confession, when one afternoon they were lying on the floor resting. Yuddha Bai sat bolt upright. “Never! Impossible!” she exclaimed at the thought of losing so valuable a helper, and also, perhaps, that one who led in the van with God, could consider a proposal to surrender her perfect freedom. “But it is true,” replied the Officer in as even a voice as she could command, albeit with quaking heart. Yuddha became very quiet. When her comrade stole a glance at her, tears were rolling down her face and presently she said, “I am glad for your sake. I have been anxious about your health, and besides . . . it is the right thing.” That little hut became a sanctuary and this woman, who rarely mentioned herself, whose life was so set apart for God as to seem beyond the pale of human desires, told of the laying aside of an early love for duty’s sake, and of longings, sometimes during the years of battle, for a love all her own. But that had not been God’s will for her. Very sweet and pleasant she made her comrade’s courtship, and later conducted her wedding.
The mother-spirit of her nature grew with the years. Her people were the children of her soul, and with wondrous love she reared and trained them; but even this ministry did not altogether satisfy the maternal craving—she must have little children about her, and her comrades recall how when engaged in writing or translating there was generally a little brown baby cuddling in her lap or rolling on the floor beside her, while two or three toddlers careered about her, coming at will for a word or touch of love.
Of the diseases of the East, Yuddha Bai had no fear. In epidemics of cholera and plague, when her people were dying in every direction, she moved amongst them, doctoring, comforting, and directing. Her presence inspired confidence, secured attention to hygienic precautions, and restored hope.
After commanding the Punjab Territory for seven years, Colonel Bannister was again ordered home on furlough. While enjoying rest and communion in her own home, one day she slipped on the stairs; later she found a lump had arisen where, in the fall, she struck herself. A specialist ordered an immediate operation. This was performed with seeming success and at the earliest opportunity she returned to her beloved India. It was indeed going home, for she was reappointed to the charge of the Marathi Territory. For two years she labored with great happiness and increasing freedom and usefulness amongst her own Converts. Then the growth reappeared and was found to be malignant. The doctor having ordered her to return to England if she wished for an operation, Yuddha Bai decided to remain in India so that she might die with the beloved people of her adoption. She was glad that nothing she had suffered in India had caused her death blow.
For ten months she continued at her post working until a few weeks before the end, her last labor of love being the revision of the Marathi Songs which had been her first work of translation. Still sitting in her chair, Yuddha Bai was Promoted to Glory.
She was laid to rest in the presence of her beloved sister, who some years previously had joined her in her work on the Indian battle-field, and of the people whom she loved more dearly than even those of her own land.
And their love for her? Their reverence can never be told in a strange tongue. An Indian Staff Officer says of her, “She was my mother. I still do the things she would wish.” He smiles and adds, “She comes to me in my dreams.”
What would Catherine Bannister say if now she could speak to us of her Indian warfare? We find some answer to this question in words she wrote a little while before her death:
“It is strange for me to realize that I was born in another land. I came out here with the Lord and because He brought me. How little I then knew what a world of joy He was preparing for me, nor what treasures of darkness, and hidden riches in secret places He was going to unfold bit by bit before my fascinated gaze in this new land, and to give into my hands as part of the hundredfold of His wonderful promise.
“Truly I came because the Lord enticed me here, yet had I known what He was bringing me to—the new and deeper love for souls—because they were so hopeless, and so helpless, and so despised—the joy of a sacred consecration to a land chosen for me not by accident of birth but by Divine choice and commission—I would have leapt to come out years before.
“I have had my days of loneliness and sickness; days when the object I sought seemed far beyond my reach; days when the barrier between me and the souls I longed to reach seemed to rise mountains high, and mock every effort of my faith to remove it, but never have I regretted that I came! No, thank God, never! I have always been able to see by faith an Army of dear Blood-washed Indian warriors singing and fighting their way through persecutions and difficulties to save their fellow-countrymen and women.”
Some words of the General (then the Chief of the Staff) written of Colonel Yuddha Bai at the time of her death suggest a fitting conclusion to our consideration of this consecrated, triumphant life:
“Compare such a life with its travel, its thrilling adventure, its wonderful intercourse with many ranges of human thought, its fine ambitions and its abiding fruit, with that of the easy-going woman of ease and education who spends her time in the trifles she calls pleasure, or in the narrow cares which she calls duty!
“There was no break in this devoted woman’s service. She held fast to the simple principles of Salvation Army teaching, and set a high example of obedience, when that obedience—as was sometimes the case—seemed very irksome; of poverty in the face of very attractive opportunities of entering very different circumstances; of prayer, for her life was a life of prayer in the truest sense. This is a comrade of whom we may well say, her life speaks to us. Her achievements speak to us. Her testimony in death speaks to us. The message is, ‘Be true to the end and give glory to God.’”—Mrs. Col. Carpenter.

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Baxter, Mrs. M.

MRS. M. BAXTER

(Church of England)

Brought up as a member of the Episcopal Church of England, under a ministry then unspiritual, I had, although trained to a high moral standard, “no hope,” and was “without God in the world.” In His grace He sought me, first by strong convictions that my life was fundamentally wrong and that I had no real contact with God. By the side of my father’s grave, in my ignorance of God’s love, I vowed that if He would speak with me as He did with Abraham and Noah I would willingly give up my sight, my hearing, or anything else for the privilege.


Only four months later, on October 12, 1858, God revealed Himself to me in His own Word. A friend, who had also lost her father, came to see me and spoke to me about my soul. Till that time no one had ever asked me a direct question. I told her frankly that I would not ask God for the pardon of my sins; I should be asking an unjust thing, and were He unjust I could not worship Him. God guided the reply; it was His own Word: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6).
Without a word, without a formal prayer, Jesus stood revealed to me as just, and yet the justifier of him that believeth. I had what I had longed for, communion with God, in which Jesus would speak to me and I to Him, and for many nights could not spare the time for sleep. He made it no difficulty to me to give up all for Him; it came quite natural. Dancing, acting, novels, fashionable dress, jewels, caricaturing, etc., died out of my life by the absorbing power of the new life within. It made me feel I possessed a knowledge which would save men from hell, and almost all my time was spent in speaking with individuals and seeking to win them to Christ.
But some months later, more than half a year after my conversion, although I saw souls continually saved, yet I felt a need for a deeper work of grace. A number of the Guide to Holiness was put into my hands, in which was an article by the late Mrs. Phoebe Palmer. I took it to the Lord, and then and there was led to yield up myself a living sacrifice, and to accept the cleansing from all sin as far as I then understood it, and in some way accepted the Holy Ghost to possess me.
At this time the acquaintance of the late Rev. Mr. Aitken of Pendeen, was an untold blessing to me. For eight years after this time, my life seemed to be going on from strength to strength. It was but a small sphere of labor which God gave me, in a little town and the surrounding villages, but He worked blessedly and gave me, through correspondence and through notes on the Scriptures, an increasing influence.
But I did not know how much I was occupied at that time with myself and my own holiness. I fell into spiritual pride. This opened the way for other sins of temper, etc. I was sorely disappointed with myself; I felt as though God had failed me. I had conceived a very high and ascetic standard, and I had fallen miserably below it, and though I cried to God for hours by day and hours by night, my old joy and peace did not return.
In the year 1873, I first saw Gladness in Jesus, by the Rev. W.E. Boardman, and in reading it my eyes were opened to see that I had been all this time dealing with myself instead of acting truly to my first consecration of myself to God and letting Him deal with me. All my confidence in my own experience as a savior was gone. My old experience lived again, it is true, but I was on the Divine side of it, seeing Jesus as my sanctification, Jesus dwelling in me to be patience in me, love in me, and all else I needed.
From this time God has been closely educating my conscience. While He keeps me from sinning as I trust Him, He teaches me from time to time His own views of sin, so that things which a year ago were not sin to me are so now. But the conflict is transferred; the battle is the Lord’s. He cleanses, He helps, He fights. I trust and praise Him. He has taught me the same blessed faith for the body as the soul. All glory to His holy name.—M. Baxter. London, England, March 4, 1887.
—S. Olin Garrison, Editor, from Forty Witnesses.

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Cable, Mildred

MILDRED CABLE

Mildred Cable and Eva and Francesca French . . . have accomplished missionary journeys more thrilling and amazing than any story-writer would have dared to invent. They here explain how they came together under the guidance of God.
Far away, in the interior of China, Eva French and Mildred Cable were living together in happy companionship. There had been those who prophesied trouble when one with so much driving force was put to work with another undoubtedly characterized by indomitable will power. “When there is a serious difference of opinion who will carry the day?” they asked. Many watched for the inevitable clash, and they watched in vain. Peace and harmony reigned in the busy home whose two occupants seemed made to complement each other. One contributed a fresh fount of ideas, which the other tested in the crucible of experience, and from the result arose developments which were to the benefit of all.


A tremendous task lay before them. The awful catastrophe of the Boxer outbreak had left the Church paralyzed with shock, and while some were stronger and more robust for the experience, others seemed unable to recover themselves. It was necessary for the missionaries to stay in every village, visit every Christian home, and spend long hours in listening to heart-rending stories, before it was possible even to begin with encouragement, advice or exhortation. Eva French was at her best in this work, and the experience which Mildred Cable gained as she sat, a silent listener, was the finest training she could possibly have had.
The two friends prayed, discussed and conferred, and then decided that what the Church needed at this time was the stimulus of a new step forward. There were hundreds of girls in Christian homes who had no hope of even learning to read and write. As they went round the villages, the Christian parents begged for a girls’ school with such insistence that they yielded. The school would be Mildred’s special sphere, and with such an immeasurable evangelistic opportunity she saw visions of great things that might be. It was with reluctance that she saw curtailment of the happy, free village tours, but she accepted the exacting demands of institutional life, confident that they constituted her immediate duty, and set herself to the initial task of training her first band of teachers. They were all young women of exceptional strength of character, each had a personal experience of conversion, and they were to her a joy and crown of glory. She worked and they worked, and together they carried to a successful issue a task which at the commencement looked almost impossible.
In later years, when visitors walked round the large compound and saw the school organization working so smoothly through every grade, from kindergarten to normal training, it was hard for them to realize that all this had grown from the first summer school when Mildred Cable, herself far from proficient in the language, sat with half a dozen Chinese girls around her, teaching them the first elements of arithmetic and geography, and at the same time inspiring them with a great enthusiasm for the task to which they, and she, had been called together by God. For seven strenuous years they toiled unceasingly, and during that period the Church grew exceedingly, and that other department of women’s education, the Bible School, came into being.
Eva passed through that bitter experience of hearing week by week of her mother’s decreasing strength and, before she was able to take furlough, of her death. Eva’s English home was broken up, Mildred shrank from renewing old contacts, and for neither could the thought of furlough be disassociated from pain.
When, after crossing Siberia, they landed at dingy, grimy Liverpool Street Station and found there was no one to meet them, and that no one apparently knew of their arrival, they clung to each other for protection in a whirling multitude, each one of which seemed so competent, so absorbed and so bent on his own business that there was no place for the two waifs who had even forgotten their way about London.
Of course telegrams had miscarried, and anxious relatives were keeping the telephone busy, trying to find out by what Channel route they were to be expected. It ended in Evangeline being carried off to Mildred’s home and Francesca being summoned by telegram to come to her.
“So this is Mildred Cable!”
“And you are Francesca!”
The two women looked at each other with a long, searching glance before which neither flinched from the other’s scrutiny. They stood in the porch of Mildred’s home, for, at the sound of the door bell, she had rushed out to welcome her friend’s sister.
Eva was fast asleep upstairs, exhausted by the stormy night crossing, but a little later they were all three together with a large family party. There was any amount of lively talk, but three of the company were conscious that great issues were at stake, and that this was a crucial hour.
Francesca observed, and saw that there was a greater intimacy between Eva and Mildred than she had ever yet met between two friends. She could not see them together without detecting a deep and subtle understanding which indicated oneness of instinct and purpose. “Such a union,” she thought, “may, in God’s hands, accomplish so great things that there certainly will be inimical forces whose purpose it is to mar the friendship. I must be careful to have no part in anything which is calculated to hurt it.”
Mildred knew Eva so well as to completely understand her feelings towards Francesca, and during the months when such sad letters had come from home she had shared with Eva the knowledge of Francesca’s suffering. She watched them both and determined that so far as in her lay, nothing should be allowed which would cause pain to either sister. “If our friendship reveals an exclusive element it will bring unhappiness to both, but if there be nothing of the kind, the relationship between the three of us might develop and grow into something better than we have yet known.”
Eva sat and looked at her friend, and then at her sister, and thought: “If these two can only get to know each other they will fit, but how easily they may glance off, and never come into vital contact.”
From the first moment all three behaved with complete honesty, simplicity and truthfulness. Fortunately for their future happiness no one sentimentalized, and no one pretended anything at all.
By the close of that long afternoon each one knew that a big thing had happened. Three lives, each one of which had been drastically disciplined by a loving Father, were to be twisted by His hands into a three-fold cord, which could not easily be broken.

* * * * * * * * *

Most of the things which Francesca French felt deeply she never put into words; among them was the intensely coveted privilege of being commissioned to proclaim Christ among the heathen, but she could never have borne to suggest that her mother’s life stood between her and a possible call, therefore her desire had never been spoken. There were, however, some things which her mother did not require to be told, and she had made up her mind that Francesca, at her age, would find the mission field a trying place.
Therefore when she died, of set and deliberate purpose, she left her home with several years of lease to run. It was her way of saying to her daughter: “My child, you have fulfilled your responsibilities, now do not take on yourself hardships which will press on you quite differently to what they would have done when you were a young girl. Be satisfied to live in comfort, and serve God in the state in which it shall please Him to call you.”
It was kind and well meant, but it was mistaken, and the finger of God pointed otherwise. Something happened. As the mother lay dying, a little crack appeared in a wall of the house, which widened and grew apace, so that when the end had come, the owner was grateful to relieve Francesca of the remaining years of lease, and set himself to salvage the building. Thus, without having to take any step, she found herself relieved of the property, which must have been a great handicap to her plans. Within three weeks the furniture had been disposed of, and she was an unhampered woman. After a holiday in the country she filled up the remaining time, until her sister’s furlough, with nursing, which she loved as intensely as Eva had disliked it.
The life of a hospital nurse was so congenial to her that nothing but the commission to be a missionary would have drawn her away from it, but there was one aspect against which her mind constantly rebelled. It was to see patients come and go, bear the terror and strain of operations, descend to the very gates of death, and no place be allowed for other than organized religious ritual, in that tremendous hour. It was searing to the soul of a Christian nurse, to have only surreptitious means of speaking to her patients about God and eternity, and no time or opportunity when she might seek to lead the dying to their Savior.
After the three met, still not a word passed her lips about going to China, but during the long minute in which she and Mildred Cable looked into the depths of each other’s eyes, unformulated questions were met by unspoken answers, and she was not surprised when, some time later, the question was asked: “What about China?”
Guidance had always come to her by way of the strictly rational, and when the council of the China Inland Mission wished to know how she received her call, she could only answer: “God would not have taught me that the evangelization of the world is the function of the Church, and then removed one by one the obstacles from my path, if He had not intended me to step forward in the way in which He opened before me.” Some members of the council seemed to question the definiteness of a call which came so simply, but it was ever so, for her. Direction was never given as from a glaring arc-light, but by the glimmer of such a little oil lamp as threw a circumference of light only enough for the next step. She was beyond the age limit, but the way was made easy for her by the fact of her good health, so that the doctor, while he was turning down younger candidates, accepted her without hesitation.
They certainly never styled themselves “The Trio,” and scarcely know how they came to be called by that name, but in time it was evident that by this title their friends referred to them. It was undeniably appropriate, because the three people were equally involved in the fulfillment of the commission, so the Trio they remain.
The Chinese had their own way of saying it and it leaked out one morning at prayer meeting, when an earnest petition was voiced for blessing on “our three-in-one teachers.”
Later, when they went to Kansu, the City of Prodigals had a saying all ready for them, for “to stick like Suchow (Chinese name for City of Prodigals) glue” is the Central Asian proverb which was immediately applied to the friendship which bound together as one Feng Precious Pearl, Kai All Brave and Feng Polished Jade to give them their Chinese names.
The journey to China was the first of many delightful wanderings which they have since enjoyed together. It began with a pilgrimage to Francesca’s birth-place in Bruges, then turned off to Brussels, to Cologne, and to Berlin with its art galleries. Moscow, which was then the city of churches and shrines, held them for as many days as passport regulations permitted, then came the long, quiet journey across Siberia, and Francesca had her first introduction to China in romantic Peking. From here they plunged inland, and finally the mule-litters swung into the mission compound at Hwochow, which to Eva and Mildred was home. A crowd of joyful converts was gathered to welcome them, and to satisfy curiosity regarding “the second Miss Feng,” as Francesca was to be called.
She was now a member of the most Christian household of which she had ever formed part. The School existed for the sole purpose of educating the daughters of Christians and bringing them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord; the Women’s School bore the title “Bible School,” and from these two institutions there streamed out a constant flow of Christian workers of every kind.
But it was not only the contacts of the immediate household, but acquaintance with circles of fellow-missionaries that amazed her by the undiluted quality of their Christianity. They were kinder, more hospitable and more unselfish than any people she had ever met. She observed in many of their houses a motto hanging on the wall which declared:
Christ is the Head of this House,
The Unseen Guest at every meal,
The Silent Listener to every conversation,
and the families evidently set out to make this thing true; yet sometimes as meals progressed and conversation took its course, Francesca became conscious of an unwritten law, which forbade the expression of anything to which anybody present might not give whole-hearted agreement. Again and again she began to say things with intention to draw spiritual illumination from those whom she felt ought to be her teachers, but a tremor in the eye of her hostess warned her she was nearing the rocks, and she fell silent.
She would look at the motto and say to herself: “If my Lord were indeed sitting at the head of this table as Listener to, and Sharer in, all our talk, how freely we should express ourselves to Him, and all of us would drop our masks and come out with thoughts bolder than we knew we had it in us to think.” It was also among her fellow-missionaries that she first learnt that timid phrase: “It might be misunderstood . . .”―such a dangerous point of view, it seemed to her, as translated into action might lead one anywhere.
Strange to relate, these same people were as bold as lions in facing and fighting the cruelties, the vices and the horrors of heathendom, and were prepared to die for their faith. Yet among these were some men and women of whom the world was not worthy, who, in the realm of thought, feared their own shadows. She saw for herself that there was truth in what she once heard pithily expressed: “The Christian army is the only one where the soldiers are more afraid of each other than they are of the enemy.”
Great interest was taken in the reappearance of Evangeline and Mildred, with a third person who was sister to one and whose relation to the other was complicated by the fact that, though her senior in years, she would be her junior in Mission standing. Would it work? Many questioned it. By the grace of God it did work, and that not by reason of similarity of tastes nor by easy yieldingness of temperaments. There was unity in the deepest things, but dissimilarity in most of those that appeared above the surface. Without complete mutual confidence and bed-rock security, the thing could never have been, nor would it have worked if there had not happened to each one that which made the will of God her final court of appeal.
Gradually, and without any spoken arrangement, the different parts learned to fit in and make the best use of any resources of talent, equipment and money which were at their common disposal. The work was far too important to be held up, or even enfeebled, because of some rigid or artificial rule of precedence, and the communal basis on which the three lived finally prevented anyone from looming larger than the others, as the talents, gifts and qualifications of each were a common possession of all. Concerning money, there was never a question. It was a trust to be used as directed by, and for, the Lord Who gave it.
They were all tough fighters for a measure of their own way, but when any one of them saw the other deliberately yielding her right, it so emptied victory of pleasure, that she only coveted to have an equal share in yielding also. The harmony which has existed for more than a quarter of a century, and the joys of friendship, have been Christ’s “hundredfold more in this present” for the Trio.
They have often seen themselves depicted in the similitude of the mule team, which has drawn them over so many mountains, through such dangerous rivers and across burning desert plains. The alert beast in the traces gets the first flick of the whip when there is difficulty ahead. She responds with a bound, but before the impetus of her pull has slackened, the driver has touched the steady, reliable mule in the shafts, which can be counted on to brace itself to bear the strain. Then the two pull together to one purpose and one end, but without the third mule, hitched so as to get an equal share of the weight, the mountain pass would never be crossed, nor the exhaustion of the wearisome plain endured. The beasts of the team do not select each other; that is the driver’s business, as it is his also to give the signals.
One summer there was a five-days’ retreat in the Valley of Water-mills. Everything was done to secure complete withdrawal from the ordinary ways of life, and simple meals were provided for a large party of missionaries who camped out in the courtyard, through which the mill-race rushed. A rule of silence was respected, and there was almost no preaching, but much reading of the Scripture, leisure for meditation and opportunity for silent prayer. There was joyful singing, and during the periods of intercession the group was so gripped by the power of the Spirit, that all were conscious of something happening. Something certainly happened to the Trio.
There was present a woman just back from the distant North-West province of Kansu, where she had glimpsed the magnitude of the unevangelized areas. One day she voiced an importunate reminder of the great cities where the name of Christ was not even known. As the prayer-meeting went on, there was a mighty shaking of hearts, and at the close all knew that some wall of Jericho came tumbling down that day. The holiday over, all went back to work, but the claims of that unevangelized land on the Trio could not be stifled, so they bought a map of Kansu and put it on the wall as a reminder.
Something had to be done, and someone had to do it. As they mused the fire burned, and a letter was written to the person who could best give them the information they required. Their question was this: “Are the conditions in the North-West such that experienced, middle-aged missionaries, with a working knowledge of the Chinese language, would be useful, or do they more definitely demand young people who lack experience, but have greater physical vigor?” The answer was unequivocal: “Experience, in this case, is more valuable than youth,” and, strengthened by this confirmation, the Trio forthwith wrote a letter to the Mission authorities, volunteering for service in the unevangelized areas of China’s great North-West.
It was the beginning of a correspondence distressing to all concerned. They were up against one of the more difficult aspects of guidance, for it seemed as though the people concerned were being led diversely. This could not be recognized as a part of Divine procedure, and the only way to unmask the satanic deception was to stand still and wait for true light to break through, show the path, and unify the purposes of all God’s servants who were concerned.
For twelve months they waited on the issue, unable to withdraw, because the hand of God pointed onward, and unwilling to advance until they could do so with the consent of those whose authority they recognized.
Even though the correspondence was confidential, the secret leaked out and many people took strong sides, which only helped to confuse the issue. Some wrote, saying in more or less parliamentary language, that there were no fools like old fools. Others asked the junior members of the party if they had visualized what it would be to have the senior die on their hands, and know that they had been the cause of the disaster. There were those who simply received a superficial impression that after twenty-one years of grind the Trio wanted a change. The postman was busy bringing suggestions of the varied spheres which they might fill, until it became a source of amusement that they should be considered suitable to such a variety of duties; but the manifold propositions, the insistent urgings and distracting suggestions were enough to deceive the very elect, and to wear out their tired spirits.
This year of uncertainty was spent in the valley of humiliation, but at last the consent they expected came and when it came, true to the courageous lines laid down in the constitution of the China Inland Mission, it bade them go forward and preach, wherever God should lead them.
The Trio went forward, but the one place on earth which was home had to be abandoned, and everything which bore the value of association must be handed over to others. The aged Chinese pastor, on hearing the news, laid his head on his hands and sobbed like a child. School teachers were stunned, and converts begged the missionaries not to leave them.
As time narrowed in, the emotions escaped from control and everything was poignant. “This is the last Christmas we shall spend together,” “the last time we shall see our courtyard vine in blossom”; then “Farewell, farewell.” It was over, and with bleeding hearts they plunged into the unknown.
Immediately every manner of doubt was released on them. Each indication of guidance, each leading was suddenly made to look trivial, uncertain, unreliable. Every earnest of a commission ahead was called into question, and when, in the final issue, one of the three broke a wrist, another snapped a tendon and they journeyed on, maimed and halt, they were utterly silenced towards those who called it a fool’s errand and who now might well consider themselves justified by events.
It was well for the Trio that there were some few who stood by them, prayed for them, encouraged them and held over them the shield of faith. Among these was one friend who seemed specially appointed to strengthen them in their darkest hours. Her friendship with Francesca was of long standing and dated from a day when, sitting in a shelter on a very lonely shore, she and her mother, in pursuit of one of the long debates which their souls loved, were turning a subject to and fro, trying, by viewing it in its every facet, to gain that general aspect which would come nearest to the complete truth.
They thought themselves alone when, suddenly, an incisive voice cut into the discussion. It came from a lady sitting at right angles to them, who was hidden behind her own glass partition. She had been a silent listener to the talk for as long as she could refrain from breaking in. At a certain point, however, convention yielded to compulsion, and she burst in with an adroit rebuke to the younger woman for what she was pleased to call her “specious arguments.” For the next hour the discussion raged, for neither would yield an inch, and an acquaintanceship begun under such propitious circumstances could scarcely fail to ripen. This was the commencement of a mental and spiritual intimacy between Francesca and this lady which resulted in great things for the Trio.
The Lady of the Shelter had a master mind, dominated by the Spirit of God. Sternly limited in her physical activities by ill-health, her body was mostly tied to a sofa in her own comfortable home, but her mind roamed among things cosmic and eonian. By the exercise of her powers of spiritual and mental insight she was able to co-ordinate facts which to the ordinary person appeared insignificant, sorting them and giving to each its correct place in the general plan. At the given moment the scriptural key would be accurately fitted to the lock of world politics and the ray of light released by the most recent discovery of science, so focused as to illumine the Christian path and the conflict which besets it.
Through the Babel of confused voices which made it almost impossible to distinguish between the suggestions of the Holy Spirit, the promptings of one’s own desire and those of other people’s interference, simple clear words came to the Trio from this prophet of God, which restored order and dispersed confusion.
“I have seemed from the very first,” she wrote, “to grasp the inner movement of your hearts in the matter of your move to Kansu and have felt its imperativeness. But then we share the same spirit of prophecy, and that acts as an amazing eye-opener. I feel the urgency of the currents of spiritual forces set into motion by your message to that province, coming, as it evidently does, in a pause before a storm. There is something very remarkable about this call―the place and the moment and the quality of your triple service. Evidently there are unique links here, forged back in the spirit and brought forth now in the body. There ought to emerge from this a piece of clean-cut, apostolic work before the great trial comes. Anyhow, you will feel full of confidence, full of calmness and power, the Lord being with you and with your hearers, to re-create souls and bring them to the birth. . . .
“These are days of fear. These are days of psychic suggestion. These are days of old, old bogy tales coming back to paralyze, to haunt and to confuse―most of all to confuse. Satan makes up old ghosts into new ones and people are mystified and nervous, and it all helps him. Have none of it! Our souls and bodies are redeemed, bought back; only the body is left to wear the veil so that it should not yet see all things as they really are, and thus have no need of faith. Satan will lose, lose everything. Therefore we are free, and being so we claim from God absolute freedom from satanic tormenting, because Jesus the Messiah reigns.”
These were remarkable words to come from the quiet surrounding of a continental hotel, the more so as the one who wrote them had never set foot in China. The reiterated message which she delivered at that time was the urgency of going forward without delay, being neither hindered, confused nor side-tracked. “For,” she urged, “you have barely time to fulfill your commission. Commit it to God that you be kept from doing anything except to take His message to the people whom He has prepared to hear it.”
At the time the provinces of North-West Kansu and Turkestan were the quietest parts of the Chinese Republic, but she was alert to the first indications of coming events and detected their inevitable trend to be conflagration and revolution, with their handmaids, brigandage and massacre. By the end of a decade it had all come to pass, and there are thousands who heard the Gospel during that time who will never hear it again from human lips. They lie dead in razed cities and on Gobi battlefields.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

There were three ways of travel open to the North-West: by camel across the desert of Mongolia, by raft up the Yellow River, or by cart over the main road. The last was chosen. None of the routes were safe and the Chinese authorities insisted upon military escort through brigand-infested areas. Accustomed to thinking of journeys in terms of days, it needed some adjustment to realize that the carts in which they left the railhead would, a month later, still be carrying them on. They passed by many mission stations and at last reached the provincial capital of Kansu. Here, it being the depth of winter, a month of halt was called among fellow-workers whose kindness and hospitality was a brimming bowl. In more than one place the question was asked:
“What is your destination?”
“We do not know,” they answered.
“Have you not been appointed anywhere?”
“No, not yet.”
“Then may not this be the end of your quest?”
“We have no indication that it is.”
“But the need here is great, and in an area where you travel seven days from one station to the next, there is surely scope for pioneer work.”
Everything their friends said was so true and so reasonable that the three women had not a word to answer, and passed on feeling foolish and visionary, yet knowing perfectly well in their inner consciousness that they must courageously move forward until they reached the place of God’s appointment.

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Chesnut, Eleanor

ELEANOR CHESNUT

By Robert E. Speer

On the wall of one of the rooms of the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board, in New York City, is a bronze memorial tablet bearing this inscription:
IN LOVING MEMORY
of the
MISSIONARY MARTYRS
Of Lien-chou, China,
ELEANOR CHESNUT, M.D.
MRS. ELLA WOOD MACHLE


and her little daughter Amy
REV. JOHN ROGERS PEALE
MRS. REBECCA GILLESPIE PEALE
who, for Christ’s sake, suffered cruel death at
Lien-chou, China, October 28, 1905.
“The loved not their lives unto the death” (Rev. 12:11).
“They climbed the steep ascent of Heaven
Through peril, toil, and pain:
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.”
Eleanor Chesnut, whose name stands first on the tablet, was born at Waterloo, Iowa, on January 8, 1868. Her father was Irish, and her mother, whose maiden name was Cain, a Manx woman. The father disappeared about the time Eleanor was born and was never heard of again, and the mother, who had the sympathy and respect of the neighbors, died soon after, when Eleanor was three years old. Eleanor was adopted, but not legally, by friendly neighbors of scanty means, who had no children of their own and found the little girl both a comfort and a problem. Her adopted parents did for her what they could, and the father, looking back across the years, recalls “her loving, kindly ways, her obedience in the family circle, her studious habits, and her unselfish ways.”
But from the time she first understood her situation and loneliness and poverty, the child felt it keenly and was filled with inward resentment. However tractable she appeared outwardly, she afterward said, she was unhappy and lonely, hating control and longing for the sympathy of a mother’s love. Her great happiness lay in her school life, but when she was twelve it seemed that she might have to give up school altogether. At that time she left Waterloo and went to her aunt’s in Missouri. The home was a farm in an ignorant backwoods country community where school privileges were of the most primitive character, and the struggle for life in the home was too strenuous to leave anything for the expense of education.
In her new home, however, she heard in a round-about way of Park College. The knowledge of the existence of such an institution, where she might work her way to an education, brought a gleam of hope into her despair. In characteristic fashion she wrote directly to the president of the college, telling him her longings and difficulties, and he wrote to her to come to Parkville. She entered the academy and remained until she had completed the full college course, usually staying there summers as well as winters. Here she found an entirely new and congenial environment. She entered Park College a forlorn, unapproachable girl with many faults of many kinds; she found in Dr. McAfee a true friend, whose patience was inexhaustible and whose influence remained with her always. She also found many warm friends among the students, her surroundings were congenial, and she became as zealously honest as she declared she had been before unreliable.
She was not strong physically, and those early days of the college, teachers and students alike knew the strain of overwork and undernourishment. “I do not know,” writes a friend, “how her personal expenses were met. Her eldest brother was now at work and occasionally sent her a little money, and Mrs. McAfee had clothes given her for needy students, from which store Eleanor was largely clothed, a charity which she never could receive in any spirit of gratitude, but which she accepted of necessity and with bitter resentment. All these experiences made her in after life full of understanding, gentleness, and tact for others who were poor and forlorn and proud.” Outwardly she bore herself bravely and quietly, but her heart was very lonely, and her life had not found yet a great inner secret which brought her later the beauty and peace of a consecrated soul.
Before she left Park College she had yielded to the steady Christian influence of the college and become a member of the Church. She had also gone further and decided to become a missionary. As her reason for the decision she gave simply “desire to do good in what seems the most fitting sphere.”
She left Park College in the Spring of 1888, and went to Chicago to study medicine. To one who offered to aid her, she wrote: “I have had developed in me a liking for medical study, although I did not seriously think of the matter until of late. It seemed to me such an utter impossibility to carry out the design, as I am without means and without friends to assist. But I do trust that I am by divine appointment fitted for this work. My age―twenty-one next January. Oh! I just do long to do this work.” The strong power of an unselfish purpose was beginning to work within her. In Chicago she entered the Woman’s Medical College.
“During the first year,” writes the friend whom she came to know about this time and who became her one intimate friend and correspondent, “she lived in an attic, cooked her own meals, and almost starved. At the close of this first year of medical education, she decided to take a course in nursing as well, and that Spring entered the Illinois Training School for Nurses in Chicago for the course, which was then two years.
“This was a new and trying experience. Eleanor always resented authority which hampered her own methods, also she was careless and inexact in her ways, and training-school discipline was a continual thorn in her flesh. She loved the poor and suffering patients who were under her care, and was tender and untiring in her care, faithful to the last detail where essentials were concerned. After leaving the medical college, she spent a winter in the Woman’s Reformatory in South Framingham, Mass., as assistant to the resident physician, a very useful and happy experience, and then took a short course in the Moody Bible Institute.”
In 1893 she sent in her formal application for missionary appointment, expressing a preference to be sent to Siam: “Am willing to be sent to whatever location may be deemed fittest. But being asked if I had a preference, my thoughts turned to Siam. It is a specially interesting field to me since I have always had throughout the country friends and correspondents. If their special need and my desire should coincide it would be for me a delightful circumstance. I do not, however, set my heart on any one place, but rather pray that wherever it may be it will be the appointed one, that what powers I possess may be used to the best advantage.”
She had prepared herself carefully for the work. She had made her own way through college, medical school, and nurses’ training-school, while she worked as a nurse in summer vacations, having nursed Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his last illness. She had also taken hospital training including a good deal of pharmaceutical work, and she had sought to make up for what she regarded as her shortcomings in the knowledge of the Bible and spiritual experience by going to the Bible Institute. Those who knew her believed that she was well fitted for the work.
She was appointed without hesitation as a medical missionary on August 7, 1893, was assigned to South China, and sailed in the fall of 1894 on the steamship Oceanic from San Francisco for Hongkong. There was quite a party of missionaries on board. The fifth day out she wrote: “I fear there were very few dry eyes as we caught the last glimpse of her (the tug which had accompanied them out of the bay) and heard the last strains of Auld Lang Syne. I am glad to say that thus far I have shed no tears. It would have been easy enough, but I know there will be enough to weep over in the future.”
At the end of the journey she wrote: “I did hate to say goodbye to the Oceanic. The officers were all so kind that I shall regard them as old friends.” As soon as possible after reaching Canton she went on inland to her own station at Sam-kong, a town at the head of the waterways in the north-west corner of the province of Kuang-tung near the border of Hu-nan.
The mission station consisted at the time of one family, one self-supporting single woman and one single man. There were a girls’ boarding-school, three churches at Sam-kong, Lienchou, and Lam-mo, and wards for the medical care of women and men, though these were very inadequate. Dr. Chesnut began at once upon arrival the study of Northern Mandarin. Later she tried to acquire also some use of local dialects, almost indispensable for reaching women who know nothing but their own village dialect.
She began her work in her own way, drawing on the inner resources, and not making herself a dependent upon others. “Every morning,” she wrote to her friend at home, “I have a choice little time all to my lonesome. First I read the new quotation on the calendar, then the thought for the day in ‘Daily Strength for Daily Needs’ and finally play and sing a hymn.
“I enjoy my faltering attempts at music very much. I can speak the language of my soul quite as effectively in a simple melody as someone else might in a grand sonata. The Thwings have two baby organs and so have loaned me one to have in my room. It is a good companion. Whenever I get restless over Chinese hieroglyphics or a trifle dull I play one of the few only tunes I know. Thus far, I am thankful to say, I have been visited but little by the dread demon of homesickness. There was a time of all-goneness which lasted a week or two and helped to reduce my avoirdupois. But, thank fortune, it is past. I pray that it may not return.”
A little hospital for women was prepared. Of this she wrote: “The little hospital is nearly finished. I look out upon it with admiring eyes and fancy myself within it administering ‘yarbs’ and ‘essences’ at a great rate. I have at present a young girl in my charge sick with a low fever. How I should like to remove her from her dark room to the hospital and look after her myself. Am afraid she will not recover, though I do hope for her sake and for the work’s sake she will. Every patient that I lose counts so much against the work here. I really do labor at a disadvantage. Being able to talk so little I do not get as clear a history as I might at home. Another obstacle is the scarcity of drugs. When I want one it never seems to be in the dispensary; and when it is, sometimes I can’t find it because many of the bottles are labeled in Chinese. The horrid tin cans instead of bottles! Oh! lots of things one never would dream of. But I don’t care for any of these trifles if only I am well and make a success of what I have begun.”
She had reached China about the time of the anti-foreign disturbances in the Yang-tzu Valley fomented by Chou-han and his propaganda in Hu-nan. She refers to these conditions in one of her letters: “The missionaries here are all well and the city is peaceful. The interior seems pretty well disturbed. I do hope you won’t be frightened by newspaper accounts. I don’t think we are in any danger, and if we are, we might as well die suddenly in God’s work as by some long-drawn-out illness at home. Miss Johnston writes that the Sam-kongites are usually friendly.
“I think there is still much hope for China in spite of such expressions as ‘an unclaimable lot of heathen savages.’ But I am sure that it is our duty as a Christian nation to enlighten the Chinese, and I think very few persons at home realize what idolatry is―how full of cruel superstition China is. They spend their whole existence in fear of some devil or other, and die with it still upon them. I feel especially sorry for the women. The majority don’t know anything aside from combing their hair, doing a few household duties, bearing children, and afterward hanging them upon their backs till they are five or six years of age. They are not expected to be intelligent, and do not expect it themselves. Their lives seem so barren―their tasks no higher than those of a beast of burden―vexed with human passions and endowed with no power to control them.”
Within a year after reaching Sam-kong, Dr. Chesnut had an opportunity to go down on a visit to Canton, and while there she studied the extensive medical work of the mission hospital and also seized every chance of rendering service to those in need.
In the Spring of 1898 Dr. Chesnut removed to Lien-chou, a more favorable location than Sam-kong, the station having purchased a good site on the river bank opposite the city. “Here I am at last,” she wrote, “in the much-looked-forward-to Lienchou. Monday I had a few of the most important things carried overland. I hear that the boats are on their way. They have divided their cargo with several others and are floating the hospital bed boards and my springs. Won’t they be rusty! I only hope they won’t try to float the books and the organ. I don’t mind being here alone at all.” She was living alone at this time in Lien-chou, the five other members of the station still residing at Samkong. She was in the men’s hospital, the women’s hospital having not yet been built. In the absence of Dr. Machle, who was in charge of the men’s hospital, she was conducting all the work. In her letter she writes:
“How many people do you suppose are temporarily in my charge? Two day-school teachers, the hospital preacher, janitor, scribe, doctor, watchman, woman who helps in Sam-kong dispensary, the woman who helps in this dispensary, and the Bible-woman. I have to be after someone continually, but I do hate to get after people. I am conscious of so many failings on my own part that I don’t feel equal to attending to those of others.
“I have to perform all my operations now in my bathroom, which was as small as the law allowed before. Now with an operating table it is decidedly full. I do not mind those inconveniences at all, however. I wish I could look forward to as good accommodations for the work next year.
“I really cannot find time to write much these days. There are thirty in-patients in the hospital, most of them fever cases. If they were all of the common class they would serve to keep one person busy, but the fact of belonging partly to the official class accentuates matters. The Lien-shan official, his wife, his cousin, one child, and a whole retinue of servants are in the hospital, and the wife and child of a smaller official.
“Tonight I have a case of dementia on hand, a Lien-chou official who has ruined himself with opium. He is only thirty-five years of age and has an excellent mind. He came to me this evening to implore protection. He thinks he is continually pursued by demons. I had no place for him but my study. He is sometimes violent and has to be carefully watched. So I am sitting here on guard now. I do hope he will recover, but you have seen enough of these opium cases in the hospital to know what they are like.
“My patient is now seated at the table reading, but I can see that he is decidedly fidgety. He is a fine, tall man with a clear complexion and fine white teeth. He seems to have a good mind, and it is a pity that he is in this condition. I often think what a different idea you would have of the Chinese if you could see some of these handsome, well-dressed gentlemen. They are so polite one minute I am filled with awe and the next overcome by the ludicrousness of some child-like freak. There is the making of a great nation in China.
“One of my patients, a wealthy man, the one whose wife I mentioned before, has had a tablet made for me like the one the Lien-shan official and his cousin presented me with. The tablet is to be sent in the morning and I am going to the feast in the evening. I dread the thought of it. I am so tired. I wish I could sleep a whole day. I shall be rested however. . . . The other night the druggist gave me a prescription which you may find useful, though the ingredients are more difficult to procure in America than in China. You must catch some little rats whose eyes are not yet open, pound them to a jelly, and add lime and peanut oil. Warranted to cure any kind of an ulcer.”
How many surgeons would like to amputate a leg without any skilled helper? Of course, it is done, but it is not customary.
During the time above mentioned Mr. Lingle occasionally returned to the station from his almost constant itineration. He came to Lien-chou just when Dr. Chesnut was about to perform such an operation. I believe he held the leg, but Dr. Chesnut did the cutting and sewing.
“The operation was very successful,” wrote one of her associates. The man not only did not die on the table, but, better still, he recovered strength. Several times I saw him going about on crutches with a bright smile and good color. But Dr. Chesnut was not satisfied with the results. The flaps of skin which were to fold over and cover the stump did not fully unite. She said little about it, but one day, when she was at my place, I observed that she walked with an appearance of pain. I asked if she had met with accident, but she said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ Knowing her temperament, I forbore further questioning, but in a few days took occasion to walk over to Lien-chou, and while there made some inquiries of our good women at the hospital. ‘Yes,’ said one, nodding her head. ‘I should think she couldn’t walk well after cutting off so much skin from her leg to put on that boy’s leg.’ She was determined, at any cost, to make it a success. This was just like Dr. Chesnut. To have spoken further to her about it would have been to let her know that I knew that the flaps had not united. Silent appreciation of her sacrifice was best.”
She did not shrink from being alone. She had written some years before of preferring it, but she felt the loneliness none the less, and the burden of responsibility was very heavy for her. In due time new missionaries came to take the place of several who had stayed on the field but a brief time, and older missionaries returned from furlough. The Board did its best to keep the force full. Meanwhile she went on unflinchingly with her work far away in the interior alone.
In 1900 the money was provided for a woman’s hospital. She had begun the building in faith with $300 Mexican before she knew that the appropriation had been made by the Board.
The Boxer troubles in the north had sent foreigners in all parts of China down to the coast, but for months Dr. Chesnut declined to go. In August, however, the pressure from Canton became so great that she consented to go down, though she was without fear. In the Spring, when the storm was over, she returned. The political conditions were full of perils, however, and the perils did not decrease, and little was needed to touch off a conflagration, as later events showed. The station had always kept free from political entanglements, and that was one great safeguard. But great care was necessary.
In the Spring of 1902 she came home on furlough. She returned by way of Europe. Her time at home was spent visiting, doing postgraduate work in medicine, making missionary addresses, and raising over a thousand dollars gold to supplement a good sum raised on the field for a chapel at Lien-chou.
She declined a proposal that came to her to go to Hu-nan to take charge of the woman’s hospital medical work in that new mission. “I concluded,” she wrote, “that it would be a mistake for me to leave Lien-chou. I am acquainted with the people there, their dialect, diseases, faults, virtues, and other points. Then I am so fond of them. I do not believe I could ever have quite the same feeling of affection for any other people. All my early associations in missionary life are connected with them. Moreover, Lien-chou has been so unfortunate in the matter of losing its missionaries that I fear it would be very discouraging to those at the station. The work is increasing every year. Before I left in the Spring there was work enough for twenty missionaries instead of five.”
In the fall of 1903 she returned to Lien-chou. Her work was never conceived by her in a narrow sense, however, and her first letter to the Board after her return was a clear and convincing appeal for a building for the boys’ boarding-school, from which they were obliged to turn away boys because the old house which was in use was too small. Her second letter was an expression of her hope that another doctor might be sent to take her place so that she could go to Ham-kuang, an important town on the river south of Lien-chou, near the abandoned mission station of Kang-hau.
But she did not go to Ham-kuang. Her next journey was to another city, the city “whose builder and maker is God,” and the day of her departure was near. She had some intimation that trouble might be coming. The talk of the streets as she passed by was intelligible to her, and she knew that the general condition of the country was very inflammable.
The new missionaries whom she had been for some time expecting, Mr. and Mrs. Peale and Dr. and Mrs. Machle, who had been at Canton at the mission meeting, arrived at the station on the evening of October 29th, 1905. It was near the close of the Chinese celebration of Ta Tsin, or All Souls’ Day, which they were observing with the usual idolatrous ceremonies. A mat shed connected with the celebration had been erected on mission property. The same thing had been done the year before, and when Dr. Machle spoke about it to the elders of the village in which the mission property lay, they agreed that it was improper and would not be done again.
When Dr. Machle went to the hospital on the morning of October 28th the shed had been erected on mission property again. He picked up accordingly three of six small cannon which were being fired off and carried them to the men’s hospital, less than a hundred yards away. It was a customary Chinese way of indicating that he wished to confer with the elders. They came to see him accordingly and matters were arranged satisfactorily, and the cannon were returned. As the elders went away a mob came from the opposite direction, armed with a sword, a revolver, and sticks. The old man carrying the cannon came back and told the mob that everything was satisfactorily settled, but the rabble had already determined upon trouble, had indeed probably been waiting for an opportunity for it, and attacked the hospital.
Dr. Chesnut had come on the scene during the discussion, and on seeing the turn of affairs, instead of going into the hospital, hurried off, pursued by part of the mob, to report the matter to the Chinese authorities. She reached the police boat on the river and might have escaped in safety, but seeing the peril of the others, returned to Dr. Machle’s residence, where all the other missionaries, save Dr. Machle, were assembled―Mrs. Machle, Miss Paterson, Mr. and Mrs. Peale and Amy Machle, a little girl of eleven. The mob increased. The Chinese officials who came were unable to do anything to restrain them, and Dr. Machle joined the other missionaries and all fled by a back door. A ferry-man refused to carry them across the river to Lien-chou, and they started toward Sam-king. The mob pursued them so closely, however, that they sought refuge in a Buddhist temple about a mile away, where they hid in a cave opening into the rocks back of the temple. Here all were caught except Dr. Machle and Miss Patterson, who were separated from the others in deeper recesses of the cave. Mrs. Machle reasoned calmly with the mob until a blow from behind ended her life. The little girl was flung into the river and stabbed and drowned. Mr. and Mrs. Peale, less than forty-eight hours at the station, were slain together. Dr. Chesnut was killed first. A Chinese eye-witness told of her death:
“I arrived at the temple shortly before noon, just in time to see the mob bringing Dr. Chesnut down the temple steps to the foot of a large tree, and she sat down on a mound at the side. Some young fellows then went up to her and hit her with a piece of wood. It was not a hard blow. Four ruffians then rushed upon her and dragged her from the tree, and getting behind her pushed her down the steep bank leading to the river and threw her into the water, where she lay as though asleep. Then one of the men jumped into the river and stabbed her with a trident three times―once in the neck, once in the breast, and once in the lower part of the abdomen. Other men jumped into the water. She was then to all appearance dead. About ten minutes afterward they brought the body ashore.”
The last service she rendered the Chinese was under this tree, when she noticed a boy in the crowd who had an ugly gash in his head. Dr. Chesnut called him to her, tore off a portion of her dress and bound up the wound. It was her last patient. The lad came afterward to the missionaries and showed them the healed wound. Other Chinese boys felt the shame and disgrace of the massacre, and one of them wrote this letter:
“Canton Christian College,
“Canton, China.
“November 20,1905.
“To the Family and Relatives of Dr. Eleanor Chesnut:
“We are sadly shocked and deeply chagrined to hear of the hideous massacre at Lien-chou. It is indeed a surprise to us. After she and the other missionaries up there have done so much for the benefit of our people, instead of appreciating and feeling grateful for the many kindnesses received, they repaid them in such a cruel and brutal way. This is a shame to our people, a shame to our race! It is a sad and melancholy spectacle to see our people become so degraded and debased mentally; for there is no excuse whatever for their savagery and brutality. When we think of this our hearts break.
“We can imagine your distress and despair at the loss of your loved ones. Believe us, you have our warmest sympathy and prayers for God’s blessing upon you all. Your loved one has but gone up to her eternal home to be with the Savior. She is at peace after a life of labor and toil, enjoying her reward. And who knows but that her ‘faith unto death’ influence may be more to the lives of the people at Lien-chou hereafter than it has ever been before?
“Accept our deepest sympathy and heartfelt apology.
“With the utmost respect we are very sincerely,
“STUDENTS OF CANTON CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.”
It was clear, however, that her work was done, her life finished, and she was made ready for the higher service of the life everlasting. All the hardness of the early years was gone, and she was perfected in love at last. The peculiarity and desolation of her girlhood had been transformed into sympathy with all who were in need and complete and Christ-like ministry to all suffering.
“As a college girl,” wrote one of her classmates, “she was somewhat odd and eccentric, but to those who really knew her she was generous, kind-hearted, genuine, and especially true to her friends. She was mentally one of the brightest girls in the class of ’88. As a medical student her eccentricities decreased and her life grew and unfolded until, when she went to China, she went thoroughly trained and fitted for a service of the finest quality.
“One little incident seems to me to give the key to her whole life as a missionary in China. She heard us talking in our home of a very unlovely old woman who was dependent on the church and who made herself so disagreeable that it was sometimes hard to find money for her support. In the evening she came to Dr. McAfee and said: ‘I want to give you this money for that unlovely old woman whom nobody loves. My life is lived so much among unlovely and unlovable people that I have learned to have great sympathy and great love for them.’ ‘Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,’ was the key-note of the life of her Master, and she, too, had learned not only to minister with no thought of return, but to love to do so, which is a far greater thing.”
“The terrible news from China brought by our daily papers last week has indeed been sadly verified,” wrote another. “It came with especial sadness to us, because of our opportunity two years ago to renew with Dr. Chesnut our friendship and college days in a week’s visit she made us on her return journey to China.
“We shall always be thankful for that opportunity to know the strength and beauty of her character as developed in those lonely years of devoted service in China. So unassuming and modest were the accounts she gave of her life there, that not till she had gone did we realize the self-sacrifice and heroism underlying those years. How lonely her first years in China were I suppose we at home can never know. But in them she grew sweet and strong and wonderfully sympathetic and Christ-like. To know her was a call to higher living, to nobler serving. She has gone home, but who can doubt that her life will blossom and bear fruit in the lives of many of those Chinese women to whom in Christ’s Name she gave ‘all she had’―no mean sacrifice?”
All this perfected character was not lost when Dr. Chesnut went. It was simply transferred to its own higher and nobler sphere. She had come thus to trust God. So also may we. On the day of her death a letter was received from her, in the Board rooms, in which she had quoted these lines:
“Being in doubt, I say,
Lord, make it plain!
Which is the true, safe way?
Which would be in vain?
“I am not wise to know,
Not sure of foot to go,
My blind eyes cannot see
What is so clear to thee;
Lord, make it clear to me.
“Being perplexed, I say,
Lord, make it right!
Night is as day to thee,
Darkness as light.
“I am afraid to touch
Things that involve so much;
My trembling hand may shake,
My skill-less hand may break―
Thine can make no mistake.”
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Chippendale, Martha M.B.E.

MARTHA CHIPPENDALE, M.B.E.

Salute to a Mill Girl

The gray-haired, red-tabbed general leaned back in his chair, a broad smile instead of the usual disciplinary frown on his face. “Now there’s a woman!” he chuckled.
The aide bent forward respectfully to catch his remark.
“I tell you my staff worries would be much fewer if only I had a Chippendale on this headquarters,” he went on.
The rest of the staff smiled a shade wanly. Another of the general’s little jokes! Of course, there was no denying that this Chippendale person was a goer. If all Salvation Army folk were like her, no wonder they got things done. Her combination of utter frankness and disarming tact were positively irresistible. Not that she played upon her femininity. Too much good sense for that. Her strong suit was that she knew her stuff and could put it over. That won her a respectful hearing everywhere.


Who then was this Chippendale for whom even the embattled War Office had lost its terrors?

* * * * * * * * *

In his “Rough Islanders” H. W. Nevison has described the “bleak plateau” which can be seen from the height of Undercliffe stretching away north-east beyond Otley toward Harrogate. Martha Chippendale’s birthplace lies on this high ground, about equally distant from both Leeds and Bradford. Sixty years ago Yeadon was an isolated townlet whose tall mill chimneys scattered smuts impartially upon the washing which hung below, according to the direction of the wind. The breezes which blew across from Ilkley Moor were pleasantly cool in summer, but, early on a dark winter’s morning, they were anything but welcome, as Martha was soon to learn.
Her father worked in the mill, as did her brother, as had her mother before her. Custom and necessity dictated therefore that she should follow suit. Before she had reached her eleventh birthday, she was a half-timer―that is to say, one day at school, the next at the mill. On mill mornings she started work at half-past five, and not even the shawl wound tightly about her shoulders, nor the trot into which she broke to get inside the gate before the buzzer sounded, could save her fingers from going so numb that she could hardly feel to piece together the broken threads as they showed amid the couple of hundred spinning bobbins she had to watch.
And woe betide the piecer who was not quick on the job! A box on the ears from the spinner was the usual way of smartening the wits. Nor were the morning hours alone in their almost inhuman demands. The power loom was merciless in its regularity. Mill machinery never grew tired. The last half-hour of the day demanded as much attention as the first―so that by six o’clock in the evening Martha’s eyes and arms and legs were so weary with watching, mending and standing that she longed for nothing more than a good meal and the blessed oblivion of bed. Economists maintain that the living standards of the working class improved considerably during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Martha’s first weekly wage, however, was half a crown.
Life was uniformly drab for these mill girls. The men had their pigeon-flying, whippet-racing or rabbit-coursing, but there were no organized recreations for their womenfolk. Playing fields, youth clubs, keep-fit classes were unknown. An occasional magic lantern in the chapel hall or a Saturday night’s “penny reading” were the only alternatives to the public-house―the last refuge of the bored, the vicious and the idle. But not even the hard school of repetitive labor could quench Martha’s desire to become a first-class weaver. While still in her early teens, her alert and determined mind mastered the intricacies of the box-loom of that day, for which full-time adult work she received fifteen shillings a week.
Into the dead level of this unexciting world came a detachment of The Salvation Army. Their primary colors made an instant appeal. Their Flag was yellow, red and blue; their singing was bright and rhythmic; their voices were free and full-throated; their view of life was Scriptural and consequently simple. Man, destined for fellowship with God, was estranged from Him. There was, at the very center of human personality, this fundamental disharmony. Intended to say “yes” to his Creator, man took a perverse delight in saying “no,” thus widening the gulf between himself and his God-designed destiny. Through Jesus Christ, however, this shattered relationship could be restored. Man could be set on his feet with his face towards his true end. This was a theology which agreed with daily experience, and which working folk could therefore understand.
Mart, as she was known in the mill, had hitherto thought of religion as an affair of a particular day and place. In Yeadon, as in most parts of Victorian England, church-going was largely a matter of sober faces and stiff Sunday clothes. The good were good and the bad were bad, and the one rarely crossed the line to mingle with the other. An elder in his blacks in the bar parlor was as rare a sight as man in his corduroys in the pew. But in the musty theater, the only public building of any size in the place, where Mart attended her first indoor Army Meeting, she saw men in work-stained overalls and women wearing their aprons and shawls. The proceedings were informal, yet not aimless; the speaking was colloquial, yet not irreverent. Plainly the followers of this new and lively expression of the Christian faith were not required to adopt a special tone or pose when addressing God or speaking about Him. The utter naturalness of these new-comers fascinated Mart. With them religion and life were one.
The first Salvationists who came to Yeadon had tramped over from a neighboring town, intent on spreading “‘t’ good news.” To begin with, Meetings were held at irregular intervals, but more organized efforts were to follow. One autumn morning the mill hands, on their way to work, were surprised by outsize posters bearing the announcement:

MAJOR CADMAN
WITH HIS HALLELUJAH SOLDIERS
IS COMING TO FIRE RED-HOT SHOT AT THE DEVIL
AND DRIVE HIM OUT OF TOWN!

The bill was typical of him who was to come. Elijah Cadman was a strong, stocky man who had begun to work as a chimney-sweep before he was six years old, graduated as leader of a gang of corner-boys known as the “Rugby Roughs,” but who, after conversion, offered his services to the Rev. William Booth, head of the Christian Mission, as the Salvation Army was then called.
At this particular time, Cadman had the whole of Yorkshire for his parish, and his attack on Yeadon was conducted with his usual native wit and abounding energy. As a result, a permanent hall was secured and Martha, despite her father’s warnings, became a regular attender. Mr. Chippendale belonged to no place of worship himself, though his wife went to the chapel and his children to the Sunday-school. That, in his opinion, was all that could be expected or even desired of any respectable family. The children were therefore gathered in the kitchen and grimly forbidden to have anything to do with “so low down a lot as went to The Army.”
Martha tried to find some middle ground between obedience to her father and her own conscience by attending chapel in the early evening and then scuttering off to The Army where the Meeting began later. But this divided allegiance could not last for long. One evening she got saved, and the conversation and prayers which followed kept her till an unusually late hour.
Outside the front door her brother was waiting. “Wherever have you been?” he asked. She told him.
“You’re for it, then. Father’s waiting!”
Chippendale senior was not a deliberately cruel man, but he had a smoldering temper which the family took care not to rouse. Mart had known him turn her and her mother into the street in one of his drunken rages. For one wild moment she thought she would pitch a yarn―any old yarn to save the situation. Then her head cleared and her nerve steadied. To his opening question she answers, “I’ve been to The Army, father, and I got saved.”
“I’ll have no Army here,’’ he retorted, and with that he fell on the girl and thrashed her so unmercifully that the following morning, when she left for work, one eye was still closed, her face was a study in color, and her body had not ceased to ache from the weight of the blows which had been showered upon her.
The weaving shed was not the place to allow such an appearance to go unnoticed, and a pitiless stream of questions played upon the young girl. Mart went on working. She did not know how to defend herself, so took refuge in silence. Then came the thirty-minute breakfast break at half-past eight. Usually Martha never bothered to say any “Grace-before-meat,” but this time she bent her discolored face over her tea can. There was an amazed silence―and then more ribaldry.
“Mart’s joined ’em all right.”
“What price Hallelujah Mart?”
“And what a face to show for it!”
“Mart, dearie, who were you with last night?”
“Where’s your poke bonnet, my love?”
This raillery increased to such a pitch that Martha began to wonder whether she would be able to stick it out. But the six-o’clock buzzer sounded at last, and the girl hurried along the cobbled pavements to have a hasty tea so as to be back at the Army Hall in time for the evening Meeting. There, amid the fellowship of warm-hearted comrades, she found the strength and solace she sorely needed.
Mart confounded all the self-appointed prophets in the mill by the growing strength of her new-found convictions. Her dress, her Army badge―most of all, her behavior, showed that a real change had taken place in her life. As might be expected, she was eager to learn more about the Bible. Even Sunday-school attendance had left her woefully ignorant, and when she heard a text given out she hardly knew where to look for it. Of course, if it was a saying of Jesus, she understood she had only the Gospels to search; if a verse of a Psalm, only the Psalter. But beyond these slight clues, she was utterly at sea. She had never so much as heard of Cruden and his labor-saving concordance. So, in the attic by the fading light or, if night had fallen, by the gleam of a single candle, Martha had to go through her Bible verse by verse in search of a phrase or a sentence she might have heard quoted in the Meeting. “Dogged does it” had to be her motto.
Nor did her father ever abandon his bitter opposition to her going to The Army. Some mischief-maker aroused his wrath with a tale that his daughter had been seen singing in an Open-Air Meeting. When the girl reached home that night there was the look on his face which she had grown to dread. Again the question: “Where have you been?” Again the inevitable answer: “To The Army, father.” Mart turned to avoid him as he rose to his feet―but too late. A blow caught her with sickening force full on the cheek-bone and sent her reeling down the steps which led to the wash-house. The next thing she knew was that her mother was bathing her injured face.
“Do stop going, Mart,” Mrs. Chippendale pleaded. “You only upset your father.” But Martha grew only the more determined, and shortly after, by a strange providence, her father had a stroke which reduced him first to invalidism and then caused his death.
Meanwhile she had begun to cherish a secret ambition to become an Officer in The Salvation Army. From the first, women had held an equal place with men in the Movement. Many of The Army’s most devoted and capable Officers and Soldiers have been, and are, women. The first Salvationist Martha had seen leading an Open-Air was a woman. The first Captain at Yeadon was a woman and had made an ineffaceable impression on her young mind. The previous dream of being a top-ranking weaver faded before this new vision splendid.
Again there was opposition at home. The upward path was never smoothed in advance for Martha. Even to attend the Meetings had cost her black looks and beatings. To gain permission to wear the uniform had been a struggle. To help the work further by holding children’s Meetings on Sundays and week-nights was looked upon with additional disfavor. But to leave home to become an Officer was the crowning folly. Girls left home―in Mrs. Chippendale’s opinion―only to get married and set up a home of their own. Why on earth any child of hers should want to exchange a steady job at the mill for the uncertain mercies of an Army Officer’s life passed her understanding!
Martha pleaded, “Don’t you see, mother, I must go if God is calling me.”
“Go then,” was Mrs. Chippendale’s last word. “Go, if you wish. But remember, if you do, you need not come back again.”
With that grudging consent in her ears, Martha had to say her good-byes. Her mill friends crowded round to see her off. Their sneers and scoffs had long since given place to a genuine respect and affection for one whose religion had made her the friend of everyone in the shed in trouble. Many of the girls had steadied up under her influence. Quite a few had joined The Army. They were all sorry she was going. But there was no help for it. Martha was making that choice for herself which every adventurer for God has to make―whether his name be David Livingstone or Joan of Arc or Howard Somervell. “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” So it was farewell to the moorland air and the unsophisticated ways of Yeadon, and instead the raffish West End and pitiable East End of London in the “naughty nineties.”
A period of training was followed by appointments at twenty-two Corps in the United Kingdom, at most of which Martha was in charge. This was no soft option. When in command of a center of work of any size, Martha had to conduct (with another Officer-helper) three if not four indoor Meetings each Sunday, attend three Open-Airs, lead two, if not three, adult week-night Meetings, supervise sundry children’s Meetings on Sunday and again during the week, visit the congregation, inspire her own Soldiery, conduct their weddings and funerals, dedicate their children, beside being at the beck and call of everyone in need in the neighborhood. The cost of all this work had to be met―and the Commanding Officer was the person responsible for seeing it was met.
Martha could take it, however. Her willing heart and sturdy body were wedded to this work she loved, and―under God―she won many men and women to new and better ways of living. Her speech was always sensible and often racy; her clear singing voice―though untrained―rarely failed to attract and hold a crowd, and more than once got her out of a tight corner.
One evening she and a helper had gone into a public-house to sell “War Crys.” The men in a small drinking bar at the end of a long passage locked the door and tried to make maudlin advances. Mart kept her head. “Gentlemen, I am going to sing you a song”―and with that she turned to some verses printed on the back page of the paper she was selling. The men were silenced by the sweetness of her tones.
“Sing us another,” they cried.
“I will―on condition you unlock the door.” She kept her word and they theirs.
As Ensign Chippendale, Martha was in the flood-tide of her work at Oldham when she was appointed to the Naval and Military League. At that time―the closing days of the Boer War―this section of The Salvation Army was in its infancy. A single canteen, a rest room and a hall seating not more than a hundred people were the sum total of our property in the garrison town of Aldershot. (Today our Red Shield services cover over 1,200 Clubs and Hostels for Service Men and Women, and some 400 Mobile Canteens). But Martha had faith in small beginnings. She never forgot how unpromising her own early days had been. The routine on Salisbury Plain was vastly different from anything she had known before, but human needs everywhere were basically the same. Martha gave herself to her new work and within twelve months proved herself to be so much at home in it that she was appointed second-in-command of this growing department.
With characteristic method, Martha determined to know all that could profitably be known about the fighting services. The same determination which had gained for her a thorough knowledge of the Bible, now enabled her to master the soldiers’ “bible”―the King’s Regulations. Her knowledge of naval and military law became encyclopedic. It astonished even those whose duty it was to be versed in such matters.
In the Army and Navy alike she won her way by her fearless sincerity. She learnt to swarm up a rope ladder on to the main deck with the same ease with which later she would hold a Meeting with half a dozen Leaguers in an ammunition passage. Yet she never became “mannish.” She had too much of a mother’s heart for that. Should a ship be coming into port in whose complement were men about whom Martha was anxious, she would wait at the dock gates and then steer them safely past the harpies and sharks who seem to regard sailors as their special prey. More than one rating had cause to thank her that he got home on his long leave with his pocket-book intact.
But all that was typical of her attitude to the men she had been appointed to serve. Nothing was too much trouble. More than once a man who sought her advice turned out to be a deserter. She would never condone the offence, but, having advised and prayed with the runaway, would take him to the nearest railway station, buy his ticket, wire another Salvation Army Officer to meet him at his destination, and then beg his Commanding Officer to treat him as generously as possible.
Nor did she limit her help to Servicemen. To give one instance among many―a man had fallen out with his wife, had left his home, and then had thought better of it and wished to be reconciled. Martha was equal to the situation. She wrote to the wife asking her to be at home the following afternoon; she wired the husband to come along at tea-time. Wise counsel smoothed one disturbed spirit; an invitingly spread table and a welcome cup of tea made the other feel he was wanted, and Martha’s own blessing sealed the reunion. It sounds simple enough, but the world is not too full of people with both will and wit to unite in renewed harmony a complaining husband and an offended wife.
The European War found Martha at the height of her powers. Long experience had made her wise in handling human nature, and more than twenty years with the Forces had won for her an assured place in the hearts of all ranks. Between 1914 and 1918 she helped more men than she could count. “My ‘S’s,’” she used to say jokingly, “stand for a shirt and a shave.” She knew that soldiers back from the front line required more than pious counsel. Brother Body needed comfort as well as Brother Soul. She could provide both―and in such natural fashion that the inarticulate Tommy, whose habit it was to close up like a clam at the least hint of a pi-jaw, listened to Martha’s shrewd advice, delivered in broad Yorkshire accents, with gladness.
Early in 1914 the War Office had agreed to allow Salvationists to register as such on enlistment, and later this was followed by permission for Salvationist servicemen to join in all Army processions, and to speak, sing or pray in Open-Air Meetings. Martha happened to be in Aldershot the night this news came through. The march that night contained more than forty khaki-clad Salvationists, Martha at their head.
Her pride and pleasure were justifiable; her men were no “cissies.” One such was a Marine who was on H.M.S. Cressy when she was torpedoed in the autumn of 1914. Jumping into the sea, he had reached a floating spar when another of the ship’s company swam up and grasped it also. When it became plain that the spar would not support them both, the Marine asked his companion in distress to promise he would dedicate his life to the service of God and his fellows. The pledge was given, whereupon the Marine let go, deliberately swam away―and was drowned.
Such heroism Martha humbly wore as God’s crown upon her work. No other human reward did she desire, but further recognition was to follow. In the 1918 birthday honors list, Brigadier Chippendale―as Mart by this time had become―was gazetted a Member of the Order of the British Empire. With a beloved friend, she went on the appointed day and joined the line of those who were to be decorated. At last her turn came to stand before the raised dais, and King George V, in a few well-chosen words, congratulated her upon a life-time’s service. Martha was the first woman Salvation Army Officer so to be honored, but none deserved it better. The same bravery with which she had endured the blows of an angry father and the same determination which had enabled her to triumph over the stolid opposition of an uncomprehending mother had won for her this reward. “I have suffered for my religion,” she used to say, “but it has all come out right.”
The Brigadier worked on until Easter, 1926, when she planned a quiet holiday at Yeadon. Had she a premonition that the end was near, and did she wish to die among her own folk? She was perfectly well when she left London; but early Easter Tuesday morning she was with her Lord.
The wind from the Yorkshire moors which had once whipped about the shawl and skirt of an eleven-year-old girl on her way to work now played around the Flag and bonnet that rested upon her coffin. The mills were all closed and the pavements were lined with silent crowds to pay tribute to what Yorkshire calls “a gradely lass.”
The simple Army procession moved from the Hall to the cemetery. The solemn words of committal were read. The immortal Christian hope was clearly announced again. Then the muted notes of the Last Post, sounded by buglers from Pontefract Barracks, died away on the air. Martha had finished her course.

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Carlile, Marie Louise

MARIE LOUISE CARLILE

1861-1951
By Alice I. Cook

The life and work of Marie Louise Carlile was so closely interwoven with that of her brother, Prebendary Wilson Carlile, that, in relating her story it is almost impossible to separate the two. Neither would we wish to do so, for in the process much of untold value would be lost. By natural and spiritual kinship they worked together―with God.
Our first glimpse of Marie Carlile is as a tiny child playing on the nursery floor, and then with her brother and sisters in the garden of their lovely home at Clapham Park, memories of which remained with her for life.


As in those days too often happened, within the space of about one year diphtheria took its deadly toll in the lives of three of her little playmates. So keenly was this sorrow felt, that Mr. and Mrs. Carlile deemed it wise to remove the family to a house in Richmond that would be less associated with so sad an event.
Recalling this change of residence, in later years, Marie reflected: “It was the loving hand of God that inspired them to move from the backwater of Clapham into the stream of life where spiritual surroundings helped us all.”
The Reverend Evan Hopkins, “that inspired Saint of God,” was then the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church. Mr. Carlile, an earnest Christian previously connected with Nonconformity, found in “Holy Trinity” his Spiritual Home, and before long made the decision to become a member of the Church of England.
Marie was only twelve years of age when her brother who had become careless of spiritual things, or―to use his own terminology―“a rank outsider,” underwent a definite change of heart said to be strangely akin to that described by Charles Wesley when he wrote:
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee!
At that age Marie Carlile was just old enough to appreciate the wonder of her brother’s conversion, and throughout her life she never ceased to stress the need of that vitalizing experience, although the vitalizing came to her so differently.
It would seem as if the door of her heart had ever been open for the incoming of Jesus Christ. Now the call came to consecrate her life to Him. If ever there was a complete and once-for-all handing over of a life to God for His Service it was when Marie Carlile at the age of twelve, or before, in words such as these made her covenant:
In the glad morning of my day,
My life to give my vows to pay,
With no reserve and no delay,
With all my heart I come.
And He, Jesus Christ, the Lord of her life, accepted and sealed her offering. At his vicar’s request, Wilson Carlile, with all the enthusiasm of his recent conversion, agreed to “work up” a Sunday-school in a somewhat difficult area recently added to the parish. Characteristically he began by “conscripting teachers,” his young sister, who was as eager as he was himself, among them. To the interest and work of this Mission School, Marie continued to give of her best until, some thirteen years later, she enlisted as a full-time worker in the Church Army.
In Marie’s girlhood no dutiful daughter would think of making an important decision without the knowledge, and if possible the blessing, of her father.
In this case, very reluctantly did Mr. Carlile give his consent to her going to London to help in a work, the dangers of which he fully understood. Marie herself had read in the newspapers of “infuriated mobs” attacking the Church Army in their open-air marches, but such reports spurred on rather than deterred her. The parental permission stipulated that she should go for a short time “purely as a temporary worker.”
And so, in September, 1888, she went to the Training home in Edgware Road “just for a few weeks at a time.” In March, 1889, she became resident Superintendent of the Women’s Training Home. The “temporary appointment” ended in a life time of service for God and humanity in the ranks of the Church Army.
Marie’s first experience in this adventurous life is best told in her own words: “How well I remember my first night in the Nurses’ Training Home! What a long one it seemed! Sleep was impossible, partly because of the thoughts of the responsibilities of the work, and partly because of the noise in the streets and the hardness of the bed. I am afraid I was very cowardly, and rather dismayed at the condition of the house.
“The Superintendent’s sitting-room had in it all that was necessary, but it looked dreary without curtains, and only a box of matches to adorn the mantelpiece. There was one “ornament” in the room in the shape of a bag for string, with pink and blue roses in Berlin wool upon it which hung upon a nail. When evening came the room was lit up by a very smelly lamp, with a reflector behind it (also hung on a nail) like those often seen on costermongers’ barrows. But what happy times those were! Hard beds, blue Berlin wool roses, and smelly lamps cannot take away the real joy, for it is often when circumstances are most trying that we discover how very precious our dear Lord and Master is to us.”
So much for the indoor “comforts.” Out of door experiences were unbelievably exciting for Marie. “What stirring times we used to have,” she wrote. “My brother would take all the brothers and sisters to Lisson Grove, and they were taught how to divide up into small bands, and hold short meetings at different corners―as a rule people were most kind, but sometimes we were honored by being pelted with shrimps’ heads, dirty water, and other choice things.”
Marie Carlile in throwing in her lot with the Church Army had taken over a work beset with many difficulties. Lack of finance was a nightmare; luxuries were unknown; comforts were few and far between. Resolutely she left her sheltered home behind. For sixty years she lost her life as she might have known it; but she gained life in devoted service to her Lord and Master. She gained also the love and deepest affection of the hundreds of “Sisters” whose lives were molded by her loving hands. It has been observed that in a remarkable degree she stamped her personality on the women of the Church Army. By their devotion, sympathy, quiet-thought, frequently in smile or word, Church Army Sisters are her reproductions. And the stamp is indelible. The result of her work has been that thousands of men and women of all ages have been influenced for good, and thousands, through her influence, brought to the feet of Christ.
When Marie Carlile first left her home to take up this work, certain of her friends had exclaimed, “Oh, what good can such a small frail person do there!” but those who so spake knew not love’s strength. A member of her family has described her as “a great soul aflame for God in a fragile body.” Fragile she certainly was, and inevitably she experienced several breakdowns in health! On one occasion a voyage to Australia was advised, and there were other periods of enforced rest; yet, from each one she returned with a renewal of spiritual force which enabled her to pass on blessing to others in ever more generous measure.
How loyal she was to her brother! She understood his difficulties and shared his anxieties. In the evenings when the Headquarters closed, she would go over the problems of the day with him. It was a lovely partnership. Her womanly intuition meant quite as much to him as his “wise” counsel did to her.
On the 22nd December, 1950―which proved to be her last Christmas on earth―she wrote to her great-nephew, the Rev. E. Wilson Carlile, on his appointment to the succession to her brother’s leadership: “God has called you to a great work for Him. . . . I wanted you to know how full of gratitude I am about it all, and how my poor prayers will go up much for you through this Glad Season. May the sweet lowliness and glorious power of Christmas rest upon you in deep blessing.”
When at last the shades of evening fell and her work was done, in joyful anticipation she said: “How amazing that notwithstanding my unworthiness, I, even I, shall see my glorious Lord Whom in my humble way I deeply love and adore!” . . .
For several years before, and during the World War II, the author of this tribute arranged that Lenten Services for Women should be held annually in Weston-super-Mare. Among her most loyal and self-effacing helpers were two sisters of the Church Army. These young women with their hearts’ devotion aflame with heavenly love, counted it joy to care for tired mothers and little children in a Holiday Rest Home by the sea. They so served because Marie Louise Carlile had first opened a door and led the way through.
On 21st October, 1952, Lady Cynthia Colville unveiled a plaque to the memory of Marie Carlile in St. Paul’s Chapel which is part of the Church Army’s Headquarters building. It may be seen there close beside a similar one in memory of her brother. The inscription includes . . . “In affectionate remembrance of Marie Carlile” . . . “Beloved leader of Church Army Sisters for over sixty years.”
A life’s work does not end with what we call death. In the lives of these Sisters, she carries on her love-service and will do so as year succeeds year. And when in their turn these, who have spent their strength in caring for others, grow tired and are ready for rest, they will be cared for themselves in a beautiful Home in Croydon―the Marie Carlile Memorial Home. Love is eternal.
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Clarke, Sarah D.

SARAH D. CLARKE

Mrs. Sarah D. Clarke was one of God’s noblewomen. For thirty-one years she labored incessantly among the outcasts and downcasts of Chicago with that love shed abroad in her heart which only the Holy Spirit can give. During the early years of the Pacific Garden Mission, her husband, Colonel Clarke, was with her, and when he died she bravely took up the burden where he laid it down.
She achieved something that few women have equaled. It is possible she holds an all-time record. For over six thousand successive nights she never missed a night meeting in the old Mission! During this time she also visited the county jail two and three times a week, going from cell to cell and talking to prisoners.


Her power and influence over drunken and unruly men was remarkable. One night in particular a poor fellow on crutches came in very drunk and almost crazy. He disturbed the meeting incessantly until two of the ushers remonstrated with him, and soon there was trouble and all three fell to the floor together. When the drunken man in a frenzied rage reached for his crutch and would have done serious injury to those around, he felt the touch of a small hand upon his arm and looked up into the face of “Mother Clarke.” The man suddenly became quiet and the meeting went on.
Her life was simple and humble. She was visiting in a hospital one day and stopped to talk with a poor sick girl who was unsaved and hardened in heart. She seemed unmoved by all Mrs. Clarke could say to her. In the next bed lay a piteous outcast, wasted and worn, and this rebellious girl said to herself, “If that woman gives that girl a kiss, I will believe in her religion.” Mrs. Clarke passed on to the next bed, spoke a few comforting words to the poor girl and as she was leaving, stooped and kissed her on the forehead.
That kiss led to the other girl’s salvation. She wrote to Mrs. Clarke and said: “That kiss was the means of my conversion, for I afterwards gave my life to Christ and have a happy home, and shall never cease to thank God for your visit to the hospital.”
Hundreds of men and women date their entrance into the new life to the time when Mrs. Clarke with a few chosen words induced them to take a stand for Christ.
Mrs. Clarke became Mel Trotter’s mother in the Lord. To the glory of God he found himself surrounded by loving hearts. Among all of his friends, Mrs. Clarke proved to be a “mother in Israel.” Her letters to her spiritual boy reveal a depth of love and understanding for the one who so narrowly escaped a drunkard’s grave. In her letter from Chicago she said:
March 6, 1900
My dear Beloved Boy:
Nearly one whole month and not a peep from you, but my dear Bro. you are faithfully remembered as I promised every day, and sometimes I feel led to remember you often. I know the Lord must be blessing you for He has promised.
As usual I am on the rush every day, hardly know when or where to stop. We are having wonderful meetings. The tide is rising higher and higher. Well, we all miss you so much but know the Lord needs you there, or He would not have sent you. Therefore you can depend upon His promise that His wisdom, grace, and strength will be sufficient for you. In sweetest love, kind remembrance to dear Mrs. T. and with Christian fellowship,
D. Clarke

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Clephane, Elizabeth

ELIZABETH CLEPHANE

Beneath The Cross of Jesus
By Mark Abbott

Elizabeth Clephane was a frail Scottish girl, who lived near Sir Walter Scott’s famous home at Abbotsford. Though limited in health, she gave of herself in service to the poor of the area, so much so that she was known to the townspeople as the “Sunbeam.”
Elizabeth was a writer of hymns. From her pen came the much-loved Gospel song “The Ninety and Nine,” made popular by Ira Sankey during Moody’s revivals in Great Britain. She also wrote one of the greatest hymns of the cross, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” Written only one year before her early death, it contains some marvelous expressions of the spiritual significance of the cross.


The hymn speaks of the shame of the cross. Today the cross is a symbol of honor, displayed high on church steeples, on communion tables, and worn around people’s necks, but not in the days of Christ. Then it was the epitome of shame. Cicero, the Roman historian, said, “Far be the very name of a cross, not only from the bodies of Roman citizens, but from their imaginations, eyes, and ears.” Furthermore, no Jewish person could think of the cross without horror because the Law of Moses had stamped it with a curse.
There was the shame which Christ Himself experienced, as He, the sinless, spotless Son of God bore our sins on the cross, causing even His Father to turn His eyes away from Him.
As we stand beneath the cross of Jesus, we see the shame and suffering of Christ, but in a very real sense we feel shame creeping over our hearts when we realize
“What thou my Lord has suffered
Was all for sinners gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression
But Thine the deadly pain.”
As Miss Clephane put it, this is “the very dying form of One Who suffered there for me.” We feel a hot blush on our cheeks as we hear the hymn speak of “my sinful self,” or “unworthiness,” or “worthlessness” as the writer originally put it. As we stand beneath the cross we see in clear perspective the shame of our sins which helped to crucify Him.
But the cross is not only a symbol and a reminder of shame, but of strength. As we stand and gaze upon it we see the strength of the cross. The glory of the cross is that this which might seem to be one of the greatest tragedies of all time has been transformed into the greatest triumph.
Miss Clephane uses two very descriptive words to point out the strength of the cross. She speaks of a “rest upon the way.” As we gaze upward we remember the words of the One Who hangs there: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
The cross, to the hymn writer, is not only a rest, but a rock, “a mighty rock within a weary land.” The cross, as a rock, is a symbol of solidity, of security, of strength. It is unchanging despite the chaos and turmoil that surround it. The love demonstrated in the cross and the salvation made possible through the cross are always available. Whether as a rest or a rock or both, the cross is strong on our behalf.
Finally Elizabeth Clephane speaks to us of the shadow of the cross. To the Christian, the cross casts a shadow over all of life, not in the sense of darkness or gloom, but in the sense of a presence and an influence. When the sun goes down or goes behind a cloud, we have shadows which are gloomy and we wish for the sun to come out again. But remember that time when you were alone and waiting the approach of a friend. All of a sudden there was the approach of your friend. The shadow of the cross is a cause for joy because it indicates the presence of Christ.
Elizabeth Clephane put it this way:
“I take, O cross, thy shadow
For my abiding place.”
But we must never forget that the shadow is made by the One Who said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
This season is a time of special and intensified gazing upon the cross. As again this year we stand “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” let us be humbled by its shame, invigorated by its strength, and determined to abide in its shadow.
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Colonna, Vittoria

MICHEL ANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA

Vittoria Colonna was then forty-six years of age and had the reputation of possessing all that can make a woman famous and glorious―wealth and high rank, learning and wit, enlightened piety and most unfeigned goodness. To describe her claims to honor would be like reciting a page out of some heraldic history and then enlarging on the subject in the choicest images of fair and perfect womanhood taken from Petrarch and Spenser. The Colonnas, as everybody knows, were one of the most famous families in Italian history. Her father, Fabrizio, Duke of Palleano, was a great soldier; her husband, Francesco d’Avaloro, Marchese di Pescara, had had perhaps a still greater reputation. Vittoria had loved them tenderly, but with something of the Roman matron. She knew their trade was fighting, and was well schooled to all the chances of such a life.


A perennial spring of piety and of poetry enabled her to throw around those she loved a halo of sweetness and elevated sentiment, and to a great extent her ideal was realized. Father, husband, adopted son were among the better representatives of the age in which they lived. Her married life was among the purest and happiest ever found in such a sphere and must have been almost incomparable in her own day. One is almost inclined to think she owes her exceeding brightness to the moral darkness in which she shone. But a wider knowledge of history shows us that such bright and lovely blossoms do, at long intervals, appear on the tree of humanity as if to show of what it is capable and still more by their moral loveliness to cheer those who are so happy as to come beneath their influence.
But it is not often such women add to their moral charm the high gift of poetry. It was here Vittoria Colonna specially excelled. This gift was to her pure, well-balanced mind the greatest of all consolations, and probably a singular help against temptations. By its means she was enabled to bear the great loss which fell upon her in 1525. Pescara was only thirty-six years of age when he was taken from her. Her grief at first was irrestrainable, and she was determined to end her days in a convent. But the intervention of her friend, Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, Clement VII., issued a brief forbidding the nuns of S. Silvestro to receive her, and she was thus almost forced to give herself to the world.
This she did, but in the best sense; for she soon became the center of a high class and elevated society which shone like a silver moon in the night of Italian religion and Italian freedom. All the nobler minds were among her friends: Contarini and Reginald Pole, both Cardinals; Giulia Gonzaga, famous for her beauty and virtue. These with many others, noble and learned persons, were much affected by the peculiar doctrines of the Reformation―justification by faith. I have hinted how interested Vittoria Colonna was in the Pauline Epistles, and how much she valued the teaching of Occhino, at one time General of the Capuchins, and confessor and private chaplain to the Pope. Peter Martyr, then an Augustinian monk, and the Spaniard Juan Valez were among the leaders; indeed, to the latter the whole movement seems traceable.
It was just at this happy moment in the life of this charming lady that Michael Angelo, sad-hearted and weary, having worn his chain some sixty years, came under her influence. It affected him like a symphony of sweet music. It not only lulled his pain, but introduced a new hope. Liberty was lost, the tide of corruption was overwhelming Italy, but here was new life. Individual conversion, personal consecration, individual justification, individual sanctification; what might not be hoped if such a faith could spread?
That this fascinating woman should herself be an example of this faith, was an attraction to a heart so profoundly pious as that of Michel Angelo, cannot be doubted; but for both awaited purifying trials, dark days to be passed through before Eternal light appeared. Contarini died; Pole was overwhelmed with relative trials; Occhino and Peter Martyr, dismayed by the rapid rise of a persecuting party, fled from Italy, and Vittoria had to bend to the storm, for Caraffa and his terrible Inquisition were at hand; in a few years, to hold the opinions held by cardinals Contarini and Pole and openly advocated by Occhino, would be death. Some, indeed, would go to the stake simply for having been members of Vittoria Colonna’s society. To culminate her sorrows, she lived to see the ruin of her family. That family which had so often wrestled with Popes was now overcome by Paul III. He managed by force and treachery to seize their castles and their lands, and the last time Vittoria Colonna came to Rome, none of her family were there.
At the beginning of 1547 her strength completely failed. She was carried from the convent where she was residing to the palace of Giuliano Cesarini, a relative in Rome. She had hardly anyone to console her but Michel Angelo.
The end came one evening towards the close of February 1547. She said to Michel Angelo who stood by her couch: “I die. Help me to repeat my last prayer. I cannot now remember the words.” Holding her cold hands in his, he repeated the prayer, her lips moving as he spoke. Suddenly her large eyes opened and gazed upon him, the old smile played upon her face, and she passed away, saying something that was inaudible. He bent down and reverently kissed her hand; of nothing, he afterwards said, did he so much repent as not having kissed her forehead and her cheeks also.
The nations who bask in the sunlight have sometimes seemed most in bondage to the fear of death. The Florentines were peculiarly affected by its terrors. Michel Angelo was no exception. The approach of night, of the grave, of death and of judgment to come, such is the melancholy note which runs through much of his work. And now when the most elevating friendship he had ever formed was thus broken, his thoughts rested with solemn awe on the possibilities of the double death.
At first it was natural that he should invoke the help of that bright spirit whose unclouded faith had aroused hope in the midst of his darkness, and in a sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna, he says:

’Midst endless doubts, shifting from right to left,
How my salvation to secure I seek,
And still ’twixt vice and virtue balancing,
My heart, confused, weighs down and wearies me;
As one who, having lost the light of Heaven,
Bewildered strays, whatever path he takes;
I, Lady, to your sacred penmanship,
Present the blank page of my troubled mind,
That you, in dissipation of my doubts,
May on it write, how my benighted soul
Of its desired end may not so fail,
As to incur, at length, a fatal fall;
Be you the writer, who have taught me how
To tread by fairest paths the way to Heaven.
―John S. Harford’s Life of Michel Angelo, 1858, from whence also most of the other translations of quotations from Michel Angelo’s poems are drawn.

Just before her death he had made for her a drawing of a Madonna, sitting at the foot of the Cross; the dead body of the Christ is stretched upon her lap, and her eyes and arms are raised to Heaven. The Cross itself is shaped so as to symbolize the Trinity, and on it is written a line from Dante’s Paradise.
No one reflects how much blood it has cost.
The sentiment intended to be aroused was pity―compassion for Divine suffering. It was a favorite form, in which Michel Angelo chose to set forth the Crucifixion. But now the great artist, il gran Michel Angelo, as his contemporaries called him, began to be full of pity for his own soul.

My spirit now, midst errors multiform,
Weak, wearied, and infirm, pardon implores;
O Lord, most high, extend to me that chain
Which links within its grasp each gift divine;
Chiefest to Faith I bid my soul aspire,
Flying from sense whose ways conduct to death.
The rarer be this gift of gifts, the more
May it to me abound.

But Michel Angelo, in whom as we have seen the sentiment of justice was so profound, saw that Pity could not be divorced from Justice in Him Who was alike the source of all justice and all pity; and it was perhaps this aspect of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ that brought home to his struggling soul its power to deliver the conscience and set the burdened sinner free. He writes in one sonnet attributed to this time:
For though Thy promises our faith compel,
Yet, Lord, what man shall venture to maintain
That pity will condone our long neglect?
Still from Thy blood poured forth, we know full well
How without measure was Thy martyr’s pain,
How measureless the gifts we dare expect.
Thus is he led to see that salvation is by grace, and that every effort towards Divine Light is itself an inspiration from Heaven.
What sweetness will attend my acts of prayer,
If Thou to pray to Thee will give me power!
Within my heart’s bleak soil, no means are found
Fruits to produce of innate excellence.
Thou art the seed of just and holy works;
Where’er Thy power is felt they germinate:
None have th’ heroic will to follow Thee
Unless Thou teach them first Thy beauteous ways.
How diverse in this matter is human experience. Vittoria Colonna found her way into the new life, as the butterfly bursts from the chrysalis. One of her sonnets ends thus:
And as the light streams gently from above,
Sin’s gloomy mantle bursts its bonds in twain;
And robed in white, I seem to feel again
The first sweet sense of innocence and love.
Whereas the deliverance of Michel Angelo can only be compared to the efforts of an half sculptured statue to escape from the marble block. There it must forever remain unless the master’s hand shall set it free.
So Michel Angelo himself was at last able to say:
From a vexatious, heavy load, set free,
Eternal Lord, and from this world unloos’d,
Weary to Thee I turn, like a frail bark
’Scaped from fierce storms into a placid sea.
And on his eighty-third year he addressed a sonnet to Vasari, in which he writes:
Painting and Sculpture’s aid in vain I crave;
My one sole refuge is that Love Divine
Which from the Cross stretch’d forth its arms to save.
―R. Heath.

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