These dates are relevant to the context of the letter. Dr. Bitting's retirement was effective 12/31/1924, and church records show he had formally notified the church of his decision to retire on 11/2/1924.
COPY
SECOND BAPTIST CHURCH
King's Highway, Washington and McPhersonson Avenues
| W. C. Bitting, Minister 5109 Waterman Ave. |
St. Louis, Mo. |
January 7, 1925.
Mr. Arthur Lieber
4512 Westminster Place
St. Louis, MissouriMy dear Arthur:
I want to write you a letter "just so". I have been thinking more intensely than ever about you during the last few months. Ever since the minute when I told you of my contemplated resignation and your own good nature showed itself in every possible method of expression, I have been thinking much of my gratitude to God for all these precious years of our close friendship. My relations with you have been extraordinary. I doubt whether any pastor and director of church music ever had a more beautiful relationship than we have had. I am very sure that few, if any, have ever experienced the same happy understanding and cooperation. It has been unique. You have tried to enter into my ideals, and I have tried to share yours. You have had the visions of the artist, and I have had the ideals of the prophet, and we have tried to work together. In all the nineteen years we were officially associated there has never been anything else than the utmost cordiality between us. I doubt whether anyone else can say the same thing.
You have always been eager to help our services be times of genuine worship. You have not pushed aside the religious and spiritual ideals which ought to dominate these services for the sake of artistic musical exhibitions. You have most cordially aided me in my effort to educate our congregation in the knowledge of the best type of hymns and tunes. If you will recall what the congregation knew and did when I came here with what it knows and does today, you can see the enormous advance. We have been limited and have not been able to use all of the richness of our hymnal because in these matters I have had to move slowly in order to hold on to what we have gained by persistent effort. I cannot acknowledge my debt to you with sufficient expression. Your own beautiful spirit, your utterly unselfish disposition, your passion for service, your eager desire to use all of your magnificent endowment for the good of the great cause of religion, and expecially for the welfare of the church, have always most deeply impressed me. My heart is overflowing with gratitude.
This relation with you is one of the brightest stars in the firmament which has covered my pastoral efforts in St. Louis. There are a few of these very brilliant shinings in the heavens and they more than compensate for a number of other things wherein I have failed to accomplish my desires.
I shall never forget what you told me in a holy moment about your own life and how you individually had experienced changes in yourself which you were generous enough to ascribe to my ministry. This is a sacred matter and gives me unbounded joy. It is only through such experiences which consciousness weaves into the very fiber of our souls that we come to know beyond any question the vitality and reality of the great things that make life rich and inspire us to do our best. I thank you, dear fellow, for what you told me. Such things are the real rewards of a minister's life.
No doubt there will come to me in coming years many specters of my failures, many memories of things I tried to do but was unable to accomplish. At all such times I shall run away from these tantalizing memories into the brightness and joy and gladness of my relations with you and what you have told me about yourself. This refuge and others of the same kind will always shut me out from the pains of complete mortification. They will be havens of comfort to me.
God bless you and your dear wife and your darling boy. May all the future years bring all of you every benediction and success. You richly deserve all these things, but you have found the sure way of getting them. That path is the one you have been treading, the road of self-forgetfulness, of disinterested service, of unselfish gift of ourselves to great causes and to the welfare of our fellow men. I know that you will never leave that path.
Two or three times I have been on the point of trying to say all this to you, but I could not speak it to your face as well as I can write it. Furthermore, I want you to keep this letter so that if in your own life there should come rough places and unsatisfying experiences, you will have before your eyes the testomony of one whose journey with you personally and in service to the kingdom of God has brought to him great joy and a fadeless gratitude.
Yours affectionately,
signed W. C. Bitting
WCB:MPJ