Frances Willard Baptized, Becomes Famous Advocate for Women
[ABOVE: Francis Willard—Anna A. Gordon, The Beautiful Life of Francis Willard. Chicago, Illinois: Women’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1898. Public domain]
FRANCES WILLARD was famous for her work on behalf of alcoholic prohibition and women’s rights. For many years, she oversaw huge growth in the numbers and influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, efforts tireless and convictions strong. But her early life was far different.
Although she was raised in a Christian home, Willard wrote later that she was a skeptic until her conversion in June, 1859 at the age of nineteen. Ill with typhoid fever, “the doctor had said the crisis would soon arrive, and I had overheard his words.” As she lay in bed that night, she seemed to hear two voices, one saying, “My child, give me your heart. I called you long by joy, I call you now by chastisement; but I have called you always and only because I love you with an everlasting love.” The other said, “Surely, you who are so resolute and strong will not break down now because of physical feebleness. You are a reasoner and never yet were you convinced of the reasonableness of Christianity. Hold out now and you will feel when you get well just as you used to feel.”
After a long struggle, she responded, “If God lets me get well I’ll try to be a Christian girl.” But her resolve did not bring her peace. “You must at once declare your resolution,” said the inward voice. Although Willard had always been able to share openly with her mother, it humbled her pride more to admit her decision for Christ “than any other utterance of my whole life has involved.” After a hard battle, “in which I lifted up my soul to God for strength, I faintly called to her from the next room and said, ‘Mother, I wish to tell you that if God lets me get well I’ll try to be a Christian girl.’”
That winter, during revival services in the Methodist church in Evanston, IL, she was deeply stirred by the messages. At the first public opportunity, she went alone down the aisle to the altar, her heart
beating so loud that I thought I could see as well hear it beat as I moved forward. One of the most timid, shrinking and sensitive natures, what it meant to me to go forward thus, with my student friends gazing upon me, can never be told. ... For fourteen nights in succession I thus knelt at the altar, expecting some utter transformation—-some portion of heaven to be placed in my inmost heart ... I prayed and agonized, but what I sought did not occur.
One night she returned to her room and knelt beside her bed, baffled. There she realized that her conversion had reached its crisis on that summer night, months ago now, when she said “yes” to God in bed. Convinced of this, she testified at the next meeting and submitted her name to the church as a probationer. Willard was not baptized for a year because she waited for her sister Mary to join her. Meanwhile, she led a prayerful life, studied her Bible, and found church services pleasant. She became an active soul-winner. “I had learned to think of and believe in God in terms of Jesus Christ,” she wrote.
On this day, 5 May 1861, Willard and her sister Mary submitted to baptism and joined the church. Her life of faith would become one of the most dramatic and powerful of the late nineteenth century.
—Dan Graves
----- ----- -----
For more true stories of women who changed the world, read our book Great Women in Christian History
