Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati

by Warren Crocker Herrick

Dr. Rainsford evoked a loyalty which held his young men long after they had "graduated," and when he died in 1933 at the age of eighty-three, many of his former assistants were in the chancel of old St. George's for the burial service. One who was present said, "We shall not see a service like that again, for we shall never see and know another Rainsford." Eulogies are not customary at funerals in Episcopal Churches, but on this occasion the tradition was fittingly broken, and Mr. Nelson delivered a brief address from the pulpit in a breaking voice, barely audible at times. In this very moving tribute, the speaker reveals much of himself:

I am not here to presume to speak of the man we loved in any formal way; to try to weigh the imponderable, to measure the immeasurable—but only to say a word out of our hearts of thanksgiving to God that the rector was our rector in the days that are passed, was The Rector always and will be always, for those who knew him, who loved him, to whom he gave that tremendous love of his.

A book was written by a friend of his some years ago, and the dedication of that book was this: "To William Stephen Rainsford, who has seen the Christ and has shown Him to men."

I know of no more perfect description of the rector than that. For twenty years and more of his rectorship in this great parish he showed Christ to men; showed Him in the incomparable words that he poured forth Sunday after Sunday and year after year from this pulpit—in his great concern for the men and women and little children; for the strong and for the weak; for the wise and the foolish; for the saints and the sinners; for those who labor and were hungry and perplexed, and were strained by the tasks of life. They came here week by week; they heard from him the words that refreshed them and sent them back with courage and with faith in God and in man, to the tasks that were breaking them, to the problems that were perplexing them.

I suppose that to every one of us who knew him in his great days here and have known him in the years since, the one supreme thing that poured out of his life was his love of God. Not the love of God that theologians speak of, that men reason about, but that pure love that a man gives to his friend, to his loved ones—personal, intense, vital, real.

We came here church people, professing the Christian faith, thinking we believed in God and in His son, Jesus Christ, and as we sat under the rector here Sunday after Sunday, we came to know that our profession was a form of sound words, that in him was the form of unsound words, but that he poured forth reality for the thing that we professed to believe in, and he helped us to see the real work of God, the real passionate love of God for men—not for the chosen few, but the weak, the broken, the struggling—those in sorrow and the hungry—the love of God that drove him to lay down his life as few men had laid down their lives before. He gave of himself without stint, rejoicing in the chance to serve his God and his fellowmen with his whole heart and soul, with such passionate devotion that at last broke through his own conventional beliefs and tore them to shreds, and made him the voice of the living God, to us in St. George's, to New York and to America.

In the great days of his preaching, he took us who were his clergy—young, inexperienced and conceited—and made us over. He took us, to whom religion was a profession, and made of it a passion. He was ever patient with us, giving us his best; day after day walking with us around Stuyvesant Square in the morning, sometimes for hours, and then pouring out to us as we walked the best religious thought of his time, his judgment on the questions of the day, his interpretations of religion and the tremendous work of the church as a gift that God had put into the souls of men for service to their fellowmen.

He told us of his thought for men and women, of the problems of the time, of the problems of the church—not conventional, but vital, not formal, but distinctly real—and then he would take us into his study and we would kneel there. And never have I heard a man pray as the rector prayed—without any of the ecclesiastical technique and form of prayer, without any formal discussions of the value of prayer, but pouring out the things that we had been talking of; as real to God as they were real to us, bringing into them God; God's companionship, God's sympathy, God's understanding and patience; God's ruthless will that we should love our fellowmen and serve our fellowmen—without name, without a distinction.

That is the vivid life, a little of it, that we lived with, which made God real to New York and to us here at St. George's, and to his clergy. God has taken him home, and we meet here, every one of us, because the rector—broken though he was in these later years—because the rector, whose great and lovely smile we had loved to see, as we had loved just to touch his hand to gain strength, courage, faith and joy—because we cannot do that any more. His work is done and God gives him a safe lodging and he shall rest in peace to the last. Thank God who gave him to us, to know and to love, that we might be lifted by him to find God and Jesus through him.

He wrote a little prayer, and in closing I am going to read it and ask you to join with me in making it our own. Let us pray: