Lady Huntingdon, whose long life thus triumphantly closed, was happy in many ways.  She possessed rank and a competency and all the social advantages which such things involve.  She was blessed with exceptional vigour of body, of mind, and of spirit.  She was happy also in the time of her earthly life.  Above all was she happy in the fact that she came so early and so completely under the power of saving faith in the Lord Jesus and under the renewing power of the Holy Spirit.  From that time she threw herself into God’s work; and by her zeal, ability, and consecration, quite as much as by her rank and wealth, became one of the spiritual landmarks of a wonderful century.

From a course which she believed to be right even John Wesley could not move her; and on one occasion she showed her power even to the Archbishop of Canterbury.  About 1770 the prelate then holding that high office, and his wife, gave some balls and parties which scandalised even the gay votaries of fashion who attended them.  Remonstrances which Lady Huntingdon addressed to the archbishop, Dr. Cornwallis, through relatives, being treated with ridicule and contempt, she appealed direct to George III.  The King and Queen received her most graciously, conversed with her about her religious work for more than an hour, and a few days later surprised the Archbishop by a letter requesting the summary suppression of these “improprieties.”  The prelate was probably as much astonished as shortly afterwards a lady was, who, in the King’s presence, said Lady Huntingdon must surely be insane since she had ventured to “preach to His Grace.”  “Pray, madam,” said the King after he had assured her she was quite mistaken, “have you ever been in company with her?” “Never!” “Then never form your opinion of any one from the ill-natured remarks and censures of others.”

Fitted to shine in courts, in an age notoriously pleasure-loving, profligate, and irreligious, she deliberately and whole-heartedly cast in her lot with the despised people of God, “accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.”  She was tried by repeated bereavements, and she had to bear the heavy cross of a son who lived and died in hostility to the Christian faith.  But these sorrows only deepened her trust in and her hold upon the Lord Jesus Christ.  In 1747 she had written, “My heart wants nothing so much as to dispense all—­all, for the glory of Him whom my soul loveth.”  In 1791, after forty-four long years of hard labour, steady faith, and self-sacrificing zeal, she passed to her eternal rest, with the simple trust that He whose glory she had so humbly and earnestly sought had glorified Himself in her.  No nobler close could have been desired for such a life than that which God granted:  “My work is done—­I have nothing to do but to go to my Father.”

RICHARD LOVETT, M.A.

RACHEL, LADY RUSSEL.