Salvation Army Officer
As an adult Katie Booth brought The Salvation Army to France in March 1891. A captain, she led two lieutenants (one of whom was Florence Soper, who later married Katie's brother Bramwell Booth) in preaching the Gospel in Paris, wearing sandwichboards when the police forbid them to hand out leaflets. They were not well received. Their street-corner sermons were often interrupted by people pelting them with mud and stones. After repeated attempts by men on the roads to strangle them by their bonnet strings, they began pinning the strings on rather than sewing them. They lived in rented apartments where prostitutes lived in poor conditions. Progress was slow. Opposition was fierce, and those who were converted were given a rough time, sometimes being fired from their jobs. The newspaper reports in France were nearly unanimously critical.
Eventually, Captain Booth moved on to Switzerland, where the opposition was even fiercer. The authorities refused to allow her to rent halls in which to preach, and she was arrested, tried, acquitted, and subsequently deported from Switzerland for conducting an open-air meeting in a forest outside Neuchâtel.
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