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