Sayings of Catherine Booth

SATAN HAS GOT MEN FAST ASLEEP in sin, and that is his great device to keep them so. He does not care what we do, if he can do that.

I would lead Hallelujah Bands and be a damn fool in the eyes of the world to save souls.

What a deal there is of going to meetings and getting blessed, and then going away and living just the same, until sometimes we, who are constantly engaged in trying to bring people nearer the heart of God, go away so discouraged that our hearts are almost broken.

The waters are rising, but so am I. I am not going under, but over.

Responding to a man who argued, “Paul said to the Corinthians it is a shame for women to speak in the church”: Oh yes, so he did; but in the first place this is not a church, and in the second place, I am not a Corinthian; besides [she continued, looking at the man’s wife], Paul said in the same epistle that it was good for the unmarried to remain so.

There comes a crisis, a moment when every human soul which enters the kingdom of God has to make its choice of that kingdom in preference to everything else that it holds and owns.

What the law tried to do by a restraining power from without, the gospel does by an inspiring power from within.

By Catherine Booth

[Christian History originally published this article in Christian History Issue #26 in 1990]

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