These dread words are not for those who have cared as our Sovereign Lady and her beloved ones have cared for the sick and the suffering and the sad; who have bound up the heart-wounds of the widow and the orphan and ministered to their earthly needs; who, like our lost Princess Alice and her royal elder sister, have tended the victims of war, shrinking from no ghastliness or repulsiveness, no horrors of the hospital where victor and vanquished lay moaning in common misery; or, like their queenly mother, have shed the sunshine of royal smiles and soothing words and helpful alms upon the obscurer but hardly less pitiable patients who crowd our English infirmaries. In her northern and southern "homes" of Osborne and Balmoral the Queen, too, has been able to share a true, unsophisticated friendship with her humble neighbours, to rejoice in their joys and lighten their griefs with gentle, most efficient sympathy. It was of a Highland cottage that Dr. Guthrie wrote that "within its walls the Queen had stood, with her kind hands smoothing the thorns of a dying man's pillow. There, left alone with him at her own request, she had sat by the bed of death—a Queen ministering to the comfort of a saint." It was in a cottage at Osborne that the same gentle and august almsgiver was found reading comfortable Scripture words to a sick and aged peasant, quietly retiring upon the entrance of the clerical visitant, that his message of peace might be freely given, and thus allowing the sufferer to disclose to the pastor that the lady in the widow's weeds was Victoria of England. These are examples, which it would be easy to multiply, of that true oneness of feeling between the lofty and the lowly which is the special, the unique glory of Christ's kingdom. May our land never lack them; may they multiply themselves to all time.
The best evidence of the truth of the Gospel is admittedly its unequalled power of lifting up humanity to higher and yet higher levels. In many and mighty instances of that power our age is not barren. And in despite of the foes without and within that have wrought her woe—of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the mammon-worship cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer—we cannot contemplate the story of Christianity throughout our epoch, even in these islands and this empire, without seeing that the advance of the Faith is real and constant, the advance of the rising tide, and that her seeming defeats are but the deceptive reflux of the ever-mounting waves.
CHAPTER X
PROGRESS OF THE EMPIRE FROM 1887 TO 1897
Duke of Connaught
Resuming our pen after an interval of ten years, we have thought it well, not only to carry on our story of the Sovereign and her realm to the latest attainable point, but also to give some account of the advance made and the work accomplished by the Methodist Church, which, youngest of the greater Nonconformist denominations, has acted more powerfully than any other among them on the religious and social life, not only of the United Kingdom and the Empire, but of the world. This account, very brief, but giving details little known to outsiders, will form a valuable pendant to the sketch of the general history of Victoria's England that we are now about to continue.
The Imperial Institute
Many thousands who rejoiced in the Queen's Jubilee of 1887 are glad to-day that the close of the decade should find the beloved Lady of these isles, true woman and true Queen, still living and reigning.