Angel Adjutant of Twice Born Men | Page 9

treasures upon the altar of Christ.

III
WOMAN'S POSITION IN THE ARMY

We write in a matter-of-fact way that Captain Lucy and Lieutenant Kate Lee received an appointment to this or that corps, and the statement is received as it was written--without surprise or reflection. But, in truth, behind such a sentence lies one of the most notable achievements of The Salvation Army as a world force--the right to public service for women.
Looking over the fifty-five years of the life of The Army, and further back still, we can trace clearly the guiding hand of God in the formation and direction of this instrument of His choosing.
When, in the order of Divine providence, William Booth was chosen to be Founder of the Salvation Army, by strange, devious, suffering ways, God led him, chastened him, disciplined him in preparation for his great work. At the same time, Catherine Mumford, by the hand of God, was being fitted to be the Mother of The Salvation Army.
She was a delicate, retiring, but highly intelligent young woman of twenty-four years of age, when she heard her minister, in the course of a sermon, give expression to the view that women were mentally and morally inferior to men. At this suggestion Catherine Mumford felt a strong native resentment rise within her. Until that hour she had held the view that God had made men and women equal in gifts of mind and heart; now she made a thorough study of the subject in the light of the Word of God and of history, and as a result she formed a reasoned opinion from which she never swerved. In a letter, remarkable for its logic and its command of vigorous English, she set forth her views to her pastor. She admitted that prejudice and custom had relegated woman to positions inferior to those occupied by men; but argued that, given similar advantages of education and opportunity, woman is man's equal, fitted to be his partner, and able, with great advantage to enter with him into all serious and practical counsels for the benefit of the race.
In championing the cause of her sex, Catherine Mumford found she had to take the field almost alone. Even William Booth, to whom she was then engaged, did not share her views. Mr. Booth believed that while woman carried the palm in point of affection, man was her superior in regard to intellect. Miss Mumford would not admit this for a moment; and by degrees, chiefly by the charming power of her own personality and also by argument, she wholly carried her beloved to her view-point.
In the 'Life of Catherine Booth,' by Commissioner Booth-Tucker, we find records of the young husband, soon after their marriage, urging his wife to lecture on various subjects.
The next move along the track which all unconsciously Mrs. Booth was blazing for a host of women to tread, publishing the Salvation of God, was in defence of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer, a consecrated American evangelist who, in company with her husband, was conducting powerful mission services in England. Mrs. Palmer's ministry, notwithstanding the fact that it was more honoured of God in the conversion of souls than that of her husband, excited a vigorous attack from a clergyman of a large church in Sunderland. In Catherine Booth's breast again flamed that powerful resentment she had felt on the occasion previously mentioned. She wrote her mother saying that for the first time in her life she felt like taking the platform in order to answer the false views propounded concerning female ministry. Instead, she wrote a well-reasoned and convincing paper on woman's right to preach--a pamphlet of some thirty- two pages. By this time her husband was so entirely with her in this matter that he encouraged her to make her defence. And we find Mr. Booth copying the pamphlet from his wife's manuscript and preparing it for the press.
But while Mrs. Booth was the most powerful advocate in England of woman's right to preach, she herself had never attempted to speak in public.
At last there came a day when she realized that her silence was not consistent with her profession and at great personal sacrifice she broke the bonds of timidity and publicly witnessed for her Lord. The following is an account from Mrs. Booth's own lips of her experience given in a public meeting twenty years after she began to speak:
Perhaps some of you would hardly credit that I was one of the most timid and bashful disciples the Lord Jesus ever saved. But for four or five months before I commenced speaking the controversy had been signally roused in my soul, and I passed through some severe heart-searchings. During a season of sickness, it seemed one day as if the Lord revealed it all to me by His Spirit.