It was in the autumn of 1890 that I sat one evening looking into the
face of a young woman who was passing through Tung-chow on her way to
her new field of work in Peking. A few words about her work in the past
explained the sadness of the brown eyes which had already seen many
life tragedies in her five years of city mission work, but their merry
sparkle when she entered into the happy flow of talk about her showed
that her sympathies were as full and rich for joy as for sorrow. Hers
was one of those rare natures in which all the lives about them are
relived. Such lives are intense, but their earth span is short.
Before many years Miss Russell knew the life histories of most of the
thousand Christians connected with the Peking Congregational churches
and outstations, knew them with her heart as well as her head. The
timepiece was never made which could tell her that the night hours were
passing when she sat in a humble, dirty home in a far-off outstation
beside some toil-worn, heartsore woman, listening to the details of the
sordid daily life, and the wrecked hopes, then resurrecting hope, and
ennobling life by linking it with the Divine life. She took no note of
the lapse either of time or strength when, in her city home, she
entertained guests of high or low degree with equal courtesy and charm.
Hers was the gift of making even the brief, formal call an opportunity
for speaking the word which might lead to an upward look or an outward
vision.
The Chinese pastor came to Miss Russell with his problems, also the
child with her new toy. She loved flowers, animals, and children, the
latter with the passionate love of a mother-heart. One who watched her
taking a little dead goldfish out of the water said, “Don’t keep
goldfish any more, it hurts you so when they die.” But the things which
hurt could no more be put outside of that wide-embracing life than
could the things which gave a thrill of joy, or enraptured her with a
sense of the beautiful.
The tragedy of 1900 brought to one of such wideness and depth of
friendship and intimate knowledge a sorrow whose outward tokens were
whitening hair and a physically weakened constitution. The first
massacres in the country brought refugees to Peking, to whom she
ministered day and night. In the British Legation she went to the
hospital to nurse wounded soldiers when she needed herself to be
carried there on a stretcher. Naturally sensitive not only to pain but
to danger and to all that was unsightly or repulsive, her sufferings
during those two months cannot be measured. The year that followed was
a drawn-out agony, as she heard the stories of martyrdoms, listened
with tense sympathy to the tales of returned refugees, gathered orphans
and widows into schools, and with a faith that never faltered planned
to build up the waste places. She might indeed have said, with Paul, “I
die daily.”
Miss Russell was large in her plans as well as in her feelings. The
past could not chain her, the present could not bind her. A Bible
school for women rose in her future, and after it became a fact, and
others were doing most of the routine work, she passed on to work into
a reality dreams of a school for women of the higher classes, with
lecture courses, mothers’ clubs, and training for social service, a
work which for many years to come cannot reach the proportions of her
vision. There could be no more fitting memorial for Miss Russell than
buildings which would help to make her dreams come true. If Mark
Hopkins, one student, and a log made a college, Miss Russell, a Chinese
woman, and a tiny Chinese room made a Social Settlement.
Miss Russell was not always logical and judicial. Her virtues carried
their dear earthly defects with them. From those who disappointed her
hope after long patience of love she might recoil into an attitude
which seemed like prejudice. Sometimes she walked so far with others
into the Valley of Baca that no strength was left to make it a well.
It might seem that the outpouring of her life was too lavish, and so
injudicious. But who knows? The impulse which went upward in prayer and
outward in loving service had its fruition in a clearer vision of the
earth mission of the Master, a vision for herself, and a vision for the
thousands with whom she came in touch. And China needs nothing more
than she needs this vision.
For those who find their richest fruition in deeds accomplished, we
crave the threescore years and ten, crowded with achievement. Those
whose gifts lie in loving and befriending may sooner rest from their
labours, for their works do follow them, and love and friendship are
deathless. Those of us in Peking who walk where Miss Russell’s feet
have trod still see the spiritual blossoming of that beautiful life.
Luella Miner.