But in Gateshead The General was to discover the most potent force that could be brought to bear upon all these questions, in the liberation of Mrs. Booth from the customary silence which Church system has almost universally imposed upon woman.  It might almost be said that the whole problem of cold formality, as against loving warmth, can be solved by woman’s liberation.  True, in the ordinary state of things, the most excellent ladies of any church become its most conservative bulwarks; and, fortified, as they imagine, by a few words in one of St. Paul’s Epistles, such ladies can oppose every new spiritual force as powerfully as some of them opposed him in Antioch, nineteen hundred years ago.  But “daughters” of God who have been liberated by His Spirit generally make short work of any continued opposition.

Mrs. Booth, herself trained and hitherto fettered by this old school of silence, to the astonishment of every one prayed in the church on the first Sunday evening in Gateshead.  The opposition of an influential pastor, in a neighbouring city, to the public ministrations of a Mrs. Palmer, a visitor from the United States, very soon afterwards led Mrs. Booth to defend her sister’s action in the Press, and thus to see more clearly than before what God could do through her, if she was willing.

The General had not yet seen the importance of this advance, and, in view of his wife’s delicate health, had not pressed her into any sort of activity, much as he had valued her perfect fellowship with him in private.  But he rejoiced, of course, in her every forward step, and when she not only visited a street of the most godless and drunken people in the neighbourhood, but began to speak in the services, he gave her all the weight of his official as well as his personal sanction, little imagining at the time what a mighty force for the spread of the truth he was thus enlisting.

After faithfully serving the Church in Gateshead for three years, he found the Conference no more willing than before to release him for the evangelistic work which now both he and his wife more and more longed for.

The final scene, when, in a Conference at Liverpool, Mrs. Booth confirmed The General’s resolution to refuse to continue even for one more year his submission to form, by calling out “Never!” marked a stage in his career which was decisive in a startling way as to the whole of his future.

“It is true that I had a wonderful sphere of usefulness and happiness,” says The General; “but I was not contented.  I had many reasons for dissatisfaction.  I was cribbed, cabined, and confined by a body of cold, hard usages, and still colder and harder people.  I desired freedom!  I felt I was called to a different sphere of labour.  I wanted liberty to move forward in it.  So when the Conference definitely declined my request to set me free for evangelistic work I bade them farewell.

“It was a heart-breaking business.