The following article was first published in ‘The War Cry', September 4, 1886:

MRS. CAROLINE REYNOLDS

One Sunday afternoon, several years ago, the owner of a large candle factory at Millwall was walking down Mile End Road, on his way from the London Hospital, when he nmoticed a crowd gathered around a quiet-looking little woman, who was standing on a chair at the street corner, talking to them. He stopped short at what was, in those days, an unwonted sight, listened till she had finished, and then, earnest Christian as he was, went up and bade her God-speed. They spoke together for a few minutes, and when he left her she put a bill into his hand which announced one of the General's meetings. The first word on the bull which struck his eye was "damnation," and his sense of propriety was so wounded that he could read no more. If people only would read our "horrible things" to the end!

But a few weeks later, a friend induced the gentleman to attend a Poplar tea-meeting, and hear this William Booth for himself. One of the five persons he saw on the platform was the woman preacher of Mile End Waste-Mrs. Collingridge, one of the first regular women workers of The Army, back in its Christian Mission days. She spoke again, and again her listener followed every word to the end. Then he turned to The General.

"Will you let her come down and speak at my place?"

Yes, The General would. "My place" was a room in the candle factory where a Wednesday night Bible class was held for its workers; and out of it was to come another quiet, timid little woman who was to slip noiselessly into Mrs. Collingridge's place in the dusty Whitechapel ranks, when she left them for golden streets, and to fill later one of the most difficult and dangerous, and one of the most difficult and delicate, posts in The Salvation Army.

"I wasn't at

That First Meeting,"

Says Caroline Reynolds, "but when I got home I found my sister-in-law crying. She said-

" ‘Oh Caroline, that blessed woman! I'll never go to bed again without saying my prayers.' (That just shows what an idea of Salvation we had!) She kept saying, ‘Come to Jesus,' and ‘if I hadn't left my baby at home, I'd have stayed to the after meeting.'

"I hadn't been used to go to church or chapel since I was twelve. I couldn't bear to go to a place of worship. It seemed as if I was afraid. But when my sister-in-law repeated those words, ‘Come to Jesus!' the thought came to me, ‘That's what I've got to do.'

"Such interest woke up all through the neighbourhood by that one little meeting, that it was the talk of the place. The next week a large packing room was cleared and seated, and the place was crowded. I couldn't tell you one word that woman said. I had only one fixed idea-‘I'm going to be saved.' Christians and enquirers were to go to the office for the after meeting. My sister and her two sons went with me. One of the sons is an Officer with Dr. Barnardo now, the other an Officer in The Salvation Army. I gave myself fully to God that night, but couldn't believe He pardoned me. Next day, it came to me suddenly in my bedroom, and I jumped up and cried out, ‘I thank Thee, God, for saving me!'"

These meetings continued to bear such fruit that The General undertook to supply Millwall regularly until it was, not long after, made a Mission station. Mrs. Reynolds'

Military Education

began at once. "I remember how I had to stand in my own street in the open-airs." But her active service began with her removal to Whitechapel. Here she joined what was called "The Female Band"-a company of Whitechapel Soldiers who went about to different parts of London under command of Mrs. Collingridge.

"We caused a great sensation in London. It was a great cross to us and a great curiosity to the people. There was no uniform then, but the Mission was always known by its neat plain dress. This was the first bringing out of women. Some of the band are still at Whitechapel; one is an Officer."

After Mrs. Collingridge's death, Mrs. Reynolds succeeded her as leader of "the female band." She also took the Whitechapel meeting one night a week, and visited constantly in the district. In those days there was a sort of soup kitchen and coffee-house connected with the Mission, and she helped in this. At last, she was attached to the "People's Market" in Whitechapel, where Major Pearson was then in charge, as a sort of second Lieutenant, and added two years' work here to her already somewhat varied experience before going out to take command of a Station.

"I'm going to send you to

Coventry.

You'll have to make your own way and find yourself a bit of something to eat," were the words in which The General finally announced to her that she was going out into that "field," then almost untrodden by women. Only two other women were then in charge of Stations. Think of that, Training Home girls, with your months of "lectures," and training and practice behind you; with "the Mothers's" letters dropping down on you just at the right time, and with al the strength claimed by the united prayers of a hundred gathered for "ten minutes" freshly given to you each day!

"My Lieutenant was a widow with two children. Commissioner Railton had been on to Coventry before and taken the Music Hall; but we didn't know where we should put up, and the bills were not out.

"We left our luggage at the station and went to the Music Hall. The man had broken his contract! We couldn't have it. I had to go and see the proprietor of the theatre. He let us have it. And I got some bills and posted them up myself at night. I didn't know anything about bill-posting then. And the children took around handbills. They said,

"Caroline Reynolds and Honor Burrell will speak and sing for God on Sunday next, at three and seven in the ------Theatre.'

"But we had no place for week-nights. So I borrowed a little kitchen for a shilling a night. We used to have open-air meetings outside and take the anxious inside. The police hunted us about dreadfully. I was summoned for obstruction in Coventry, so next I got a pork shop which would hold seventy, with a piece of ground attached. We held open-airs from seven to nine every night. The people crowded. God has always given me such love for the open-air work!

"Then I borrowed a mission hall. It was wonderful how the people got saved! There are men to-day in Coventry, who were some of its blackest characters, saved then and still on their way to Heaven. There was one publican, who left off selling beer and sells milk instead. I remember a woman who was leading a dreadful life. She went to visit a neighbour one Sunday night, and this neighbour's little girl said, ‘Mother's not home; she's gone to hear some woman preach at the Theatre.'

"'Go along with you! said she.

"But the little girl insisted.

"'It's quite right. Mother's there!'

"So one woman made off to the Theatre to see if it were true. She crept in and the spirit of God took hold of her. Her husband was saved on his death-bed through a Coventry soldier."

In a Christian Mission magazine for January, 1879, we read of a man saved under Mrs. Reynolds, whose wife had never seen him sober for two years.

Another report says:

"One Christian man, the manager of a works, said that (since we came) for the first time their boiler was cleaned out without hearing a man swear. One day, as I was walking with another sister up a street where the stones were very rough, I remarked to her how bad they were to walk on.

"'Yes,' said an old woman who was sitting on a doorstep, ‘I wish you could alter them, missus, like you are doing everything else in Coventry.'

"It used to be a bit rough sometimes of a Sunday afternoon in the theatre," Mrs. Reynolds tells us, "but I'd go right down into the pit and pray over the people. They thought we were the queerest folks they had ever seen."

"Then the theatre was condemned, and we were left with nothing but a little old factory very much out of repair. The newspapers called it the

‘Salvation Factory,'

and we took up the name; and some newspapers said we were ‘Red-hot Salvationists.' The General said, ‘That's a beautiful name!' and the next year the ‘Christian Mission Magazine' came out as the ‘Salvationist.'

"I was the first Captain who ever took colours; took them here at Coventry. And I'd never seen ‘Captain' till I saw it on some bills sent down from London-‘Captain Caroline Reynolds!' I was there twelve months, and when I left there were lots of little Stations all around as Outposts. Then Officers would come to them finally."

From Coventry, Mrs. Reynolds went to open Nottingham in the midst of a February snowstorm.

"I went all by myself to the Market Place, and the first thing I saw was a lot of men dog-fighting. I thought, ‘These are the right sort,' and I had a grand meeting. The men came around and cried, and one got saved and went back to Leicester, where he lived, and made a home for his wife-a thing she had never known before."

Work here was very slow and hard for a time, but at last God won a visible victory in the Mechanic's Hall and up and down the streets of Nottingham.

In May, 1880, Mrs. Reynolds went, with four girls, to begin work in Ireland-a land heretofore all uninvaded-by methods of evangelisation so downright and outspoken as ours. Just as well, perhaps, that simple women, utterly ignorant of all the countless political and religious complications of the country, pioneered it!

Mrs. Reynolds recalls to this day with great amusement that The Army colours given for Ireland "had a green corner with the harp and no crown. We didn't know that the harp without the crown was treason. Then we had orange hymn-books. The Orangemen gloried in that, and the Catholics were wild at it! No one will ever know what we went through in opening Ireland. There were always crowds of Roman Catholics in our open-air meetings. They won't stand songs about fighting, but anything about the Cross or the Blood they will listen to."

Belfast was the first place attacked, and the five women swept all before them there. Marvellous? People will forget that

"With Us comes the Almighty Holy Ghost!"

They reached Belfast on Friday, and had been directed to rest until Sunday. But they simply could not, and looking up a little Mission Hall for an inside meeting they held an open-air that very night, reinforced by one man. The leader says:-

"I shall never forget how they looked at us; they called us ‘Salvation Angels.' I never was received so well. The Irish are naturally a religious people, you know; the little Hall was crowded, and we had several souls Saturday night. At our first Holiness Meeting we had sixty-four people out."

And to-day, six years later, we have six Corps in Belfast.

Londonderry gave our first woman Major a very different reception, when, after three weeks at Belfast, she left two lasses to entrench the fort already captured, and went to begin work there in a great unseated Rink. Listen to her own story:-

"We began with an open-air meeting, Sunday morning, and had no opposition. In the afternoon I thought we would take a more central part. But there seemed to be no people, and when I said ‘Give out a hymn,' my Lieutenant said ‘Who shall I give it out to?' We'd only sung one verse when young men came running from all sides-regular Fenians! I thought ‘Here's a beautiful lot of people to get saved!' They yelled-danced-spit-hooted-everything! We couldn't get a hearing at all, so we walked to the Rink. The crowd followed, and the police came and stood in the Rink and looked at the crowd amazed. I went about among them, trying to quiet them. At last I said to a policeman, ‘Can't you do something?'

"'Oh, no,' he said, ‘but we'll see they don't hurt you.' We tried a little while to hold a meeting, but it was no use, so we closed early and went home to tea. We saw we couldn't have an open-air at night, so we came straight back to the Rink.

"Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I forget that sight! The police wouldn't let the crowd in, so they had formed a circle round the Rink to yell! And they did yell!

"There was a Presbyterian Church opposite, but I'm sure the minister didn't preach that night. (Query: Why didn't he come outside to preach?) We had some sort of a meeting, but the Inspector of the Police said we had better not go to our home that night, so a gentleman took us to his own house. The police escorted us. It was just so several nights, meantime we had mid-day meetings at the house of anyone who would take us in. One day I got a letter from a man who said he was a Presbyterian, who wanted me to come and bring my

Salvation Angels

and hold a meeting at his house next noon. I showed the letter to a house agent who was a friend of ours, and he said, ‘Mrs. Reynolds, if you had gone into that house, a regiment of soldiers wouldn't have got you out.' He knew the place. We worked on this way from Sunday to Thursday with no souls.

"On Thursday night five men sought Salvation. They are all standing to-day, except one who died a triumphant death. From then we went on well. We saw some stormy times, but the lads who raised the storm at first protected us."

Were not the five days' "Salvation Army riots" worth while?

By fearless patience such as this Mrs. Reynolds opened sixteen Stations during the two years and four months she was in charge of the Irish work. She had scarcely less need of it when she went to open work in the Vennel, off Edinboro's Grassmarket, and for every bit of her God-given experience, gained among the headlong, warm-hearted Irish, and the slowly won Scotch, she is finding full play in her present post as head of one of Mrs. Bramwell-Booth's Rescue Homes.

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