June 29_th_, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I have seen, with the eyes of others, in newspapers of this afternoon the account of the death—­shall I say?—­or of the ingathering of your father.  And of what he was to you as a father I can reasonably, if remotely, conceive from knowing what he was in the outer circle, as a firm, true, loyal friend.

He has done, and will do, no dishonour to the name of Russell.  It is a higher matter to know, at a supreme moment like this, that he had placed his treasure where moth and dust do not corrupt, and his dependence where dependence never fails.  May he enjoy the rest, light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him.  With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.

On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time to return southward, and resume, if it please God, the great gift of working vision.

  Always and sincerely yours,
    W. E. GLADSTONE.

III

RELIGION AND THE CHURCH

I

A STRANGE EPIPHANY

Whenever the State meddles with the Church’s business, it contrives to make a muddle.  This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected with the War.  The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its special function, and its peculiar lesson.  The function is to commemorate the revelation of Christianity to the Gentile world; and the lesson is the fulfilment of all that the better part of Heathendom had believed in and sought after, in the religion which emanates from Bethlehem.  To confuse the traditional observance of this day with the horrors and agonies of war, its mixed motives and its dubious issues, was indeed a triumph of ineptitude.

[Footnote *:  January 6th, 1918.]

Tennyson wrote of

                  “this northern island,
  Sundered once from all the human race”;

and when Christians first began to observe the Epiphany, or Theophany (as the feast was indifferently called), our own forefathers were among the heathen on whom the light of the Holy Manger was before long to shine.  It has shone on us now for a good many centuries; England has ranked as one of the chiefest of Christian nations, and has always professed, and often felt, a charitable concern for the races which are still lying in darkness.  Epiphany is very specially the feast of a missionary Church, and the strongest appeal which it could address to Heathendom would be to cry, “See what Christianity has done for the world!  Christendom possesses the one religion.  Come in and share its blessings.”