Conclusion

For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. 1 CORINTHIANS 4:20

Nineteen chapters can make it look as though Catherine Booth taught a great many things. She taught one thing, and everything else is that one thing applied. The one thing is this: that God means His religion to be real. Follow it through and the whole shape appears. Repentance must really let go of sin. Faith must really commit the person to Christ, and not merely agree with facts about Him. Assurance is the Spirit’s witness to something that has really happened. The Holy Ghost is real power, without which the truest preaching is a well-made corpse. Holiness is a real deliverance from sin, prayer a real wrestling with God, love a real love that will rebuke and suffer. And because it is all real, it cannot stay indoors. It goes out after the lost where they are, it uses whatever lawful means will reach them, it sends whoever God has filled — fisherman or factory girl, son or daughter — and it will not call evil by polite names. At the end it is the only kind of religion that will do to die with.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and she would have named it before anyone. The danger is that you admire her. It is very easy to be stirred by a fiery woman preaching to Victorian crowds, to enjoy her sharp sayings and her courage, and to close the book exactly as you opened it. She had a name for that. She called it the form without the power.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the one she would have given. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable — not the one you enjoyed most. Take its application points and actually do them. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, ask for the power and not only the form. Not a better experience or a stronger feeling, but the Holy Spirit Himself, filling a heart that has put away what hinders Him. She was sure He is given to anyone who meets Him on His terms, and that no one is too timid, too weak or too ordinary to be used. She was, she said, one of the most timid believers the Lord ever saved.

Second, go. The distinctive mark of her Christianity was that it never stayed in its own building. It went to the drawing rooms and the music halls, the slums and the West End, the drunkard and the duchess, and it spoke to all of them in the same plain, earnest way. If this book leaves you with nothing else, let it leave you with one name — someone near you who does not know Christ — and the resolve to go to them, quietly if you like, but soon.

A last word about her

We have been honest about her failings. She set aside the sacraments Christ commanded, and in that most of the church has judged her mistaken. Her doctrine of entire sanctification is disputed by serious Christians who read the same Scriptures differently. She could be severe, with congregations and with infants, and some of her counsel about the will of a child should not be followed. She made her own abstinence a rule for every conscience. None of this has been raised to diminish her. It has been raised because her own teaching requires it. A woman who spent her life demanding reality from others cannot be honoured by a portrait that leaves out the shadows.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

And the light is very bright. She read her Bible through as a sick girl and made it her own. She argued a whole church into letting its daughters speak. She walked down the aisle at Gateshead with her heart pounding and never walked back. She preached through illness for thirty years, bore and trained eight children, gave them all to the work, and helped to build a movement that went round the world among the poorest of the poor. She fought for children no one else would fight for. And she died slowly and in great pain, as she had lived, leaning on Christ.

She once asked, in her address on the Holy Ghost, who could tell what God might do by any man or woman, however timid, if only fully given up to Him. The answer, in her case, is written across the world. The question is still being asked, and now it is asked of you.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the one chapter of this book that unsettled you most, and the one application point from it that you have not yet done. Do it this week.

2. Ask God plainly for the power of the Holy Spirit, and put away whatever you know is hindering Him.

3. Write down the name of one person you will go to with the gospel, and a date by which you will do it.

4. Where you disagree with her, write down why, from Scripture. Where you agree, write down what it will cost you.

5. Read one of her own addresses in full, slowly, as a conversation with a sister who would not let you off lightly.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I have read about a woman who wanted reality, and I am quite capable of admiring her and changing nothing.

Do not let me. Give me the power and not only the form. Put away in me what hinders Your Spirit, and fill me.

Send me to the one person You have laid on my heart, and give me her courage, her plainness and her tears.

And when my own course is finished, let it be said that I kept the faith, not in word only, but in power. Amen.