Part 16

He was a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days.

There was a true ring of the "Grand Seigneur" about him which always impressed me.

Yours sincerely, REAY.

July 1st, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I thank you very much for your kindness in writing to me.

You may, indeed, presume that it is with painful interest and deep regret that I hear of the death of your father, and that I value the terms in which you speak of his feelings towards myself.

Though he died at such an advanced age, it is, I think, remarkable that his friends spoke of him to the last as if he were still in the full intercourse of daily life, without the disqualification or forgetfulness that old age sometimes brings with it.

For my part I can never forget my association with him in the House of Commons and elsewhere, nor the uniform kindness which he always showed me.

Believe me, most truly yours, ARTHUR W. PEEL.

June 29th, 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

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.

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."

There have been times and places at which that appeal could be successfully made. Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due. But for Europe at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India or China would be to invite a deadly repartee. In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world "rose out of chaos," you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which "tare each other in the slime." Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares. You still make your sons to pass through the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical science are those which make possible the destruction of human life on the largest scale. Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany and what it stands for.

Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "The present is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power and facility of the means of destruction. Science is hard at work (science, the great--nay, to some the only--God of these days) to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to annihilate the human race." We see the results of that work in German methods of warfare.

Germany has for four centuries asserted for herself a conspicuous place in European religion. She has been a bully there as in other fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological pretensions. Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has renounced the religion of sacrifice for the lust of conquest, and has substituted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ. A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists.

If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking. The Infallibility which did not save the largest section of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these latter days. No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute; but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies of sexual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.

Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile Germany and in neutral Rome? I must confess that I cannot answer. We were always told that the force which welded together in one the different races and tongues of the Russian Empire was a spiritual force; that the Russian held his faith dearer than his life; and that even his devotion to the Czar had its origin in religion. At this moment of perplexity and peril, will the Holy Orthodox Church manifest her power and instil into her children the primary conceptions of Christian citizenship?