FOREWORD
It was in the autumn of 1890 that I sat one evening looking into the face of a young woman who was passing through Tung-chow on her way to her new field of work in Peking. A few words about her work in the past explained the sadness of the brown eyes which had already seen many life tragedies in her five years of city mission work, but their merry sparkle when she entered into the happy flow of talk about her showed that her sympathies were as full and rich for joy as for sorrow. Hers was one of those rare natures in which all the lives about them are relived. Such lives are intense, but their earth span is short.
Before many years Miss Russell knew the life histories of most of the thousand Christians connected with the Peking Congregational churches and outstations, knew them with her heart as well as her head. The timepiece was never made which could tell her that the night hours were passing when she sat in a humble, dirty home in a far-off outstation beside some toil-worn, heartsore woman, listening to the details of the sordid daily life, and the wrecked hopes, then resurrecting hope, and [[8]]ennobling life by linking it with the Divine life. She took no note of the lapse either of time or strength when, in her city home, she entertained guests of high or low degree with equal courtesy and charm. Hers was the gift of making even the brief, formal call an opportunity for speaking the word which might lead to an upward look or an outward vision.
The Chinese pastor came to Miss Russell with his problems, also the child with her new toy. She loved flowers, animals, and children, the latter with the passionate love of a mother-heart. One who watched her taking a little dead goldfish out of the water said, “Don’t keep goldfish any more, it hurts you so when they die.” But the things which hurt could no more be put outside of that wide-embracing life than could the things which gave a thrill of joy, or enraptured her with a sense of the beautiful.
The tragedy of 1900 brought to one of such wideness and depth of friendship and intimate knowledge a sorrow whose outward tokens were whitening hair and a physically weakened constitution. The first massacres in the country brought refugees to Peking, to whom she ministered day and night. In the British Legation she went to the hospital to nurse wounded soldiers when she needed herself to [[9]]be carried there on a stretcher. Naturally sensitive not only to pain but to danger and to all that was unsightly or repulsive, her sufferings during those two months cannot be measured. The year that followed was a drawn-out agony, as she heard the stories of martyrdoms, listened with tense sympathy to the tales of returned refugees, gathered orphans and widows into schools, and with a faith that never faltered planned to build up the waste places. She might indeed have said, with Paul, “I die daily.”
Miss Russell was large in her plans as well as in her feelings. The past could not chain her, the present could not bind her. A Bible school for women rose in her future, and after it became a fact, and others were doing most of the routine work, she passed on to work into a reality dreams of a school for women of the higher classes, with lecture courses, mothers’ clubs, and training for social service, a work which for many years to come cannot reach the proportions of her vision. There could be no more fitting memorial for Miss Russell than buildings which would help to make her dreams come true. If Mark Hopkins, one student, and a log made a college, Miss Russell, a Chinese woman, and a tiny Chinese room made a Social Settlement. [[10]]
Miss Russell was not always logical and judicial. Her virtues carried their dear earthly defects with them. From those who disappointed her hope after long patience of love she might recoil into an attitude which seemed like prejudice. Sometimes she walked so far with others into the Valley of Baca that no strength was left to make it a well.
It might seem that the outpouring of her life was too lavish, and so injudicious. But who knows? The impulse which went upward in prayer and outward in loving service had its fruition in a clearer vision of the earth mission of the Master, a vision for herself, and a vision for the thousands with whom she came in touch. And China needs nothing more than she needs this vision.
For those who find their richest fruition in deeds accomplished, we crave the threescore years and ten, crowded with achievement. Those whose gifts lie in loving and befriending may sooner rest from their labours, for their works do follow them, and love and friendship are deathless. Those of us in Peking who walk where Miss Russell’s feet have trod still see the spiritual blossoming of that beautiful life.
Luella Miner. [[11]]