The simplest tributes to Dick Sheppard are the truest. "
I feel that I have lost a personal friend, though I never met him " someone wrote to me, and thousands of people must have been using precisely those words in the past week. The secret of projecting a personality cannot be told. It is in fact just personality ; when that is said there is no more to say. But in Dick Sheppard's case a selflessness to which there are few parallels was half the key to the secret. It is true, I think, to say that the death of no religious figure in any of the Churches would create the same sense of personal grief on a nation-wide scale as this has done. In one respect Canon Sheppard died happy. On Saturday, the day before they found him lifeless at his desk, the Chapter of St. Paul's had agreed to give him the use of the cathedral crypt for a weekly communion service for his Peace Pledge Union members. He had realised it was a good deal to ask ; he would have understood completely an adverse decision. It was not adverse, and it gave him, I think, not less deep a satisfaction than his election as Lord Rector of Glasgow.
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