BELOVED BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST:
—It is with feelings of deep gratitude to you that we write to thank you for your many comforting messages, tokens and letters of love and sympathy with us in our great trial. We not only thank you all warmly but also desire to praise and thank our Heavenly Father for the precious bonds of love in which all the members of the body are bound one to the other, and which in a time of mutual sorrow like this we are enabled the more highly to appreciate. Your prayers on our behalf are answered—God has sustained us all by His grace.
Though our hearts are sore because we miss the loved one's presence in the flesh, yet we have a deep joy in the assurance that he has entered into that presence where there is fulness of joy and pleasures for evermore. Throughout his brief illness our dear one was blessed with the confident hope that he was so soon to see his blessed Lord face to face, and he urged us, if we loved him, to rejoice because he was going to the Father.
The night before he died he requested his love to be sent to all the Churches, not only in this country, but elsewhere, and to each member of the Church, "without one exception."
He spent his last remnants of strength in exhorting, counselling, and comforting us all. If the Lord will, we hope to give you more details of his last hours, but would now repeat the main thought he impressed upon us with his dying breath: "Daily renew your covenant of sacrifice to the Lord, and daily seek to fulfil it. God will strengthen you daily not only to will to do, but to do this one thing—sacrifice daily your all to the Lord." "What a glorious day is this to me!" he said, while his eyes shone like stars of blue, "so soon to see my Lord face to face, and our dear God! So soon to enter into my reward!"
Dear Brothers and Sisters, Our earnest prayer for you and ourselves is that the memory of his sacrifice, so joyfully consummated on 9th June, 1910, may be blessed of God to us all in encouraging us to press on in the race, delighting to do, daily, the Father's will.