It has been truthfully said that woman excels in insight, in her power of intellectual penetration, in the instantaneous, intuitive discernment of truth, like that of St. John, and that the masculine mind is superior in the discursive, or dialectic faculty, in the Pauline ability to forge and weld together the successive links of a chain of reasoning. Mrs. Booth combines both these qualities. She is Pauline and Johannean in the cast of her mind. He will be happily disappointed who opens this volume expecting to find only what Renan sneeringly styles—when he characterizes the resurrection message of Mary Magdalene—“the hallucination of an excited woman’s imagination.” The reader must look elsewhere for the gospel of gush. In these sermons there is no incoherency, no rhapsody, no rhodomontade, but sound theology in consecutive propositions set forth in natural and logical sequence according to the laws of thought, the whole delivered with Divine unction, a river of truth set on fire by the Holy Ghost, bearing down or burning up everything before it. One element of her power is her plain, stout, terse Saxon speech, not slang, but the language of the home, the shop, and the street. Her sermons are theology in homespun. She eschews a scholastic form of theology in buckram and broadcloth.
