Pioneers and Founders / or, Recent Workers in the Mission field

by Charlotte M. Yonge

These converts had been under preparation for more than a year, and seemed thoroughly convinced and fairly instructed. Therefore the baptismal service was read by Mr. Deerr; and when the vows were reached, the Bishop turned to the Christians around and asked if they would be witnesses and godparents to these candidates; and, with one voice, they shouted that they would. Each candidate was singly baptized, and then came up to the Bishop, by whom the words receiving him into the Ark of Christ’s Church were spoken. At Ranobunda there was another baptism of 250, and, in the whole district, full a thousand were admitted. It was not in over-confident joy. “Time will show,” said the Bishop, “who are wheat and who are tares.” It was impossible among so many that all should be perfect Christians, but it was a real foundation; the flame then lighted burns on steadily, and the Christian faith has a firm and strong hold in the district of Krishnaghur.

Anxieties of course crossed his work. The Church Missionary Society, after being used to control its clergy, was not properly ready to allow their canonical obedience to a Bishop; and the troubles that thus arose made him once speak of Heber as happy in being shielded by his early death from the class of vexations connected with societies. To his great grief, too, a lady who had worked for years at the education of girls and orphans at Calcutta seceded to the Plymouth Brethren, and was necessarily obliged to give up the charge. It was to him “as if a standard-bearer fainteth.” The Oxford controversy also vexed him a good deal. The school of Newton and Cecil, in which he had been brought up, was at the most distant point that the Church permitted from the

doctrines of the Tracts for the Times; and few men are able or willing candidly to judge or appreciate opinions that have grown up since their own budget was completed, especially after they have been for some time in the exercise of authority. Thus he set his mind very strongly against all the clergy holding those views who came to work in the diocese; and thereby impeded a good deal that might have worked heartily with him if he had only been able to believe it, and to understand that the maintenance of the voice of the Church is truly the maintenance of the voice of Christ.

In November 1844, when on a visitation at Umballah, he had his first serious illness, a fever, he being then in his sixty-sixth year and in the thirteenth of his residence in India. For about a week he was in great danger, but rallied, and was able to be removed by slow stages, though not without an attack of inflammation on the lungs before reaching Calcutta; and his constitution was altogether so much shaken that he was ordered home, without loss of time, to recruit his health.

He returned to England by the Overland route, and after a short respite recovered much of his strength, so as to be able to preach in many churches and appear at numerous meetings; and in a year’s time the vigorous old man was on his way back to his diocese, where he arrived in time to keep the Christmas of 1846, just two years after he had been stricken down by fever. In the October of the next year he consecrated his cathedral, towards which 20,000l. had been his own donation, half towards the building, half towards the endowment. His strength was not quite what it had been before, but he still had abundant energy, and new branches of the Church were springing up around him; not only the three dioceses that had branched from his own in India, but Ceylon had a Bishop of its own, Australia had five, and the Cape and New Zealand and the Isle of Hong Kong had each received a Bishop. The principle had come to be recognized that to send out isolated workers without a head to organize was a plan that could hardly be reasonably expected to succeed; and in the long run prosperity has certainly attended the contrary arrangement. Not to speak of the Divine authority, the action of a body under a recognized head and superior on the spot must be far readier of adaptation to circumstances than that of a number of equals, accountable only to some necessarily half-informed Society at home.

In his 73rd year, just after a visitation tour, it somewhat dismayed Bishop Wilson to find a letter from the Bishop of London sending him to consecrate the new church erected by Sir James Brooke, at Sarawak. Few careers have been more remarkable than that of the truly great man who subdued Malay piracy, and gained the confidence of the natives of Borneo; and when the effort of the fourteen weeks’ voyage had been made, the Bishop returned full of joy and hope, and not long after, together with the Bishops of Madras and Victoria, joined in consecrating the missionary Bishop of Labuan to the new field of work there opening. On the last journey of his life he also visited Rangoon, and there consecrated the church, finding the clergy hard at work and numerous converts.

During the year 1856 he had many attacks of illness, more or less severe; and in December, in going across the room in haste, he struck himself against a wooden screen, and was thrown down. His thigh was broken, and his age was such that great fears for his life were entertained, but he recovered, and was able to pray with, cheer, and comfort the many anxious hearts at Calcutta during the dreadful days of the Indian mutiny of 1857, when the churches he had consecrated were stained with the blood of the worshippers.

But there was no cause for despondency in the attitude of the converts. The districts where Christianity had been so widely diffused remained tranquil, and the Christians in the cities where the mutineers were raging did not apostatize; but, unless they could conceal themselves, suffered with the whites. There was a great day of fasting and humiliation appointed by him for the 24th of July, 1857.

That day Bishop Wilson preached his last sermon. The text was from Habakkuk i. 12. “Art Thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die. O Lord, Thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, Thou hast established them for correction.” Calcutta was then trembling under the tidings of the horrors of Cawnpore, the death of Sir Henry Lawrence, and the siege of Lucknow; and no one knew what peril might be the next. Slaughter seemed at the very gates, when the old man stood forth to console and encourage, but yet to give warning strong and clear that these frightful catastrophes were in great measure the effect of our sins, our fostering of heathenism, our recognition of caste, and

were especially a judgment on the viciousness and irreligion that had been the curse of English life in India. It was in open Christianity alone that he beheld hope.