re dependence never fails. May he enjoy the rest,
light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him.
With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything
is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.

On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time
to return southward, and resume, if it please God, the great gift
of working vision.

Always and sincerely yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.

III

RELIGION AND THE CHURCH

I

_A STRANGE EPIPHANY_

Whenever the State meddles with the Church's business, it contrives
to make a muddle. This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh
by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected
with the War. The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since
the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its
special function, and its peculiar lesson. The function is to
commemorate the revelation of Christianity to the Gentile world;
and the lesson is the fulfilment of all that the better part of
Heathendom had believed in and sought after, in the religion which
emanates from Bethlehem. To confuse the traditional observance of
this day with the horrors and agonies of war, its mixed motives
and its dubious issues, was indeed a triumph of ineptitude.

[Footnote *: January 6th, 1918.]

Tennyson wrote of

"this northern island,
Sundered once from all the human race";

and when Christians first began to observe the Epiphany, or Theophany
(as the feast was indifferently called), our own forefathers were
among the heathen on whom the light of the Holy Manger was before
long to shine. It has shone on us now for a good many centuries;
England has ranked as one of the chiefest of Christian nations,
and has always professed, and often felt, a charitable concern
for the races which are still lying in darkness. Epiphany is very
specially the feast of a missionary Church, and the strongest appeal
which it could address to Heathendom would be to cry, "See what
Christianity has done for the world! Christendom possesses the
one religion. Come in and share its blessings."

There have been times and places at which that appeal could be
successfully made. Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes
to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due. But for Europe
at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India
or China would be to invite a deadly r