It has been my privilege to have listened to many men and to some women who in various countries and in different causes have been held to have exerted great influence, and to have forced ideas, principles, and reforms on the men of their time. But I have listened to none in our country or abroad who seemed to me to inspire the spirit more purely with the desire to hold fast by the right, to thrust aside the wrong, to be just, faithful, considerate, and honourable, to feel for the fatherless and the poor, and not to despise the humble and the meek. I know that all my remaining term of life there will remain deeply engraven on my memory all that she said, all that she felt, in the last conversation I ever held with her at the very commencement of her last fatal illness. Weak and suffering as she was, unable to rise from her invalid chair, she asked me to come and tell her what I knew, and to hear what she felt about the public crisis of that time (I speak of the end of 1897). The storm of South Africa was even then rising like a cloud no bigger than a man's hand out of the southern seas. I listened to her: and her deep and thrilling words of indignation, shame, pity, and honour sank into my mind, as if they had been the last words of some pure and higher spirit that was about to leave us, but would not leave us without words of warning and exhortation to follow honour, to serve truth, to eschew evil and to do good, to seek peace and ensue it. I knew well that I was listening to her for the last time; for her life was visibly ebbing away. But I listened to her as to one who was passing into a world of greater permanence and of more spiritual meaning than our fleeting and too material world of sense and sight. And for the rest of my life I shall continue to bear in my heart this message as it seemed to me of a nobler world and of a higher truth.
Yes! she has passed into a nobler world and to a higher truth--the world of the good and just men and women whose memory survives their mortal career, and whose inspiring influence works for good ever in generations to come. In this Free Church I can speak freely, for I too profoundly believe in a future life of every good and pure soul beyond the grave, in the perpetuity of every just and noble life in the sum of human progress and enlightenment. And in a sense that is quite as real as yours, even if it differ from your sense in form, I also make bold to say, this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality--Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of Humanity, for as much as ye know that your labour is not in vain in Humanity.
Surely we have before us a high example of what it is to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in good work, in the memory of Frances Elliot Countess Russell, who united in herself principles typified in the historic mottoes of her own house and that of her husband's--who kept her high courage under all adversities and opposition, in the spirit of che sarà sarà, "stand fast come what may"--in the spirit of that other motto of the Elliots, suaviter el fortiter, "with all the gentleness of a woman and all the fortitude of a man."
ILLUSTRATIONS
MINTO HOUSE, ROXBURGHSHIRE
From a photograph
