[From the Tanner Collection at the Hume Polytechnic Library. CARG-01917-R-2. Restricted access, per the 1923 addendum to the library's 1921 access restriction at Clara Westbrook's request. This letter is the one Tanner sent to Mrs. Elspeth Hume on her deathbed in April 1893, in response to a pastoral communication she had made to him. The letter was in Tanner's outgoing correspondence files; Cargill restricted it upon cataloging.]

First Presbyterian Church, No. 4 Vanderlin Row, Port Hume, the Fourth of April, 1893.

My dear Mrs. Hume,

I have had your note of the first. I have been to prayer with it at least a dozen times since. I come this afternoon from an hour of the Morning Prayer in the empty nave in which I asked our Lord for the grace to answer you with both the truth that your conscience requires and the prudence that your situation demands, in equal measure, neither sacrificing the other. I do not know that I have that grace in me at my age. I will write what I am given, and I will trust Him for what I have failed to give you.

Mrs. Hume, I have been your pastor for seven years. Before my ministry in Port Hume I had a ministry of eleven years in a parish in Schenectady, where a woman of my acquaintance had come to me in very nearly the circumstance which you have disclosed to me. She was not of our present communion; she was a Methodist. She had made, in her young married years, a connection that was not her marriage; she had borne a child of that connection; she had raised the child as her husband's. Her husband had gone to his grave not knowing. Her lover had gone to his grave — as yours has done, I understand — some years before.

That woman was seventy-one years old when she came to me. She was in her last illness. She asked me the question you are asking me.

I will give you, in substance, the answer I gave her, adjusted for the particulars of your situation, which I understand to include a daughter who will come of sufficient age in some years and who, as you have indicated, you wish to be the only person of your household to know, at such time as she has the maturity to hold the knowing.

First: the seal of pastoral counsel is inviolable. Nothing of what you have communicated to me in your letter of the 1st or in our conversation of the 28th ultimo shall be known from me to any soul. Not to Mr. Hume. Not to any of your children. Not to any officer of my church. When I am dead, what I know dies with me. I so vow to you on my ordination.

Second: the conscience you have described to me — the conscience that has borne this knowledge in silence for more than twenty years, and that now wishes, before its departure from this life, to transmit the knowledge to one other soul within the family who may keep it with a similar discretion — is, by my reading of Scripture and of the Fathers, a conscience that has chosen the right course. I cannot, within my understanding of our faith, bring myself to advise you against what you propose. You have asked me whether, in the matter of the sealed correspondence which you propose to leave to your daughter Clara upon her thirty-fifth year, you are acting in accordance with the Lord's will. I answer you: insofar as you act out of love — for your daughter, for the young man who is your son in every way except the one that signifies only to the civil registry — and insofar as you entrust the keeping of a difficult truth to the person in your family whom you judge most able to keep it without injury to others, you act in accordance with the Lord's will. Your judgment of your daughter Clara, as a woman who will hold the knowing without propagating the harm, is, in my own observation of her, a judgment I can second.

Third: I wish to say, as your pastor, one further thing. I have thought about whether to say it. I have decided to say it.

I wish to say that I have, in my twenty-four years in the ministry, never been obliged to pray longer over a reply than I have over this one. I wish to say that my reply has been formed, at the last, not by the books on my study shelf nor by the clearer teaching of any of the Fathers, but by my memory of you at the communion rail over the past seven years. A woman who kneels at that rail as you have knelt — honestly, with her hands open, without spectacle, in the manner of one who has come to the Lord with the full weight of what she is — is a woman who has, in my judgment, been answered in the heart. My reply is but a small second reply. It seconds the answer you have already been given.

Fourth and last: if it comes, at the end, that you should wish the Sacrament, send word to me at any hour and I shall come. You know my hand. You have written to me in it. I shall come at any hour.

I commend you to Him who makes all things new, Who has loved you from your first day and Who will love you into His arms when He sees fit to take you,

Your pastor and your friend,

James Tanner Minister of First Presbyterian Church, Port Hume

[The letter was received at Hume House on the afternoon of the 4th of April, 1893. Mrs. Hume died on the 18th of April.]

[marginal pencil in Cargill's hand on the archive sleeve: "Filed with CARG-01917-R under same restriction by my own judgment. See catalog card for access procedures. Tanner's kindness, from the grave, to Mrs. Elspeth Hume is also a kindness to us who read it a generation later. — E.C., 3 April 1923."]