SEPTEMBER 23RD, 1924

SEPTEMBER 23RD, 1924

... Many thanks for your very kind letter. I deeply appreciate your sympathy in regard to the home-going of dear — . I feel the loss very much, for we have been thrown a good deal together from before the time of his conversion, over forty years ago, and during recent years he has been a comfort to me in many ways. But I am sure the Lord has done well in taking him, for the normal course of his disease would have entailed a prolonged period of increasing weakness and suffering, which would have greatly tried him and those who loved him. But in mercy he has been taken home by a shorter route, and, as he said to me near the end, “All is as well as love could make it”.

I have had you all very much on my heart ever since I heard of the illness of your dear sister, and have often looked to the Lord for her that every needed succour might be vouchsafed to her just as she needs it. And that you may all be greatly comforted amidst your sorrow. We know that the Lord makes all these exercises which are incidental to our present bodily condition contribute to what is spiritual and eternal, and this in itself is great compensation. But the sweetest of all is that these bodily weaknesses and sufferings become the occasion of our learning the tender sympathies and consideration of the love of Christ. We learn Himself in a peculiar way, and in a way which no other kind of experience could give us. The experience will never be gone through again, but the precious knowledge of Christ as discovered to us in it will abide as our own blessed secret with Him.

My warmest love to your dear sister, yourself, and your husband. I trust the brethren will be helped in being together tonight.

September 23rd, 1924.