APPENDIX (Page [253]).
At Michaelmas time, 1791, Mr. Buchanan was admitted a member of Queen’s College, Cambridge, having left London on the 24th October. He was then 25 years of age. In consequence of a letter from his mother he attended the preaching of John Newton, with whom he kept up a correspondence when at college. In one of his replies to Mr. Newton he wrote: “You ask me whether I would prefer preaching the Gospel to the fame of learning? Ay, that would I, gladly, were I convinced it was the will of God, that I should depart this night for Nova Zembla, or the Antipodes, to testify of Him. I would not wait for an admit or a college exit.” Some time in the year 1794, the first proposal appears to have been made to him to go out to India, and on this occasion he wrote Mr. Newton, saying, “I have only time to say, that with respect to my going to India, I must decline giving an opinion. * * * It is with great pleasure I submit this matter to the determination of yourself and Mr. Thornton and Mr. Grant. All I wish to ascertain is the will of God.” In a subsequent letter he wrote, “I am equally ready to preach the Gospel in the next village, or at the end of the earth.”
After taking his degree of B.A., he was ordained a deacon by the Bishop of London on 20th September, 1795, when he became Mr. Newton’s curate, which he held till March, 1796, when he was appointed one of the chaplains to the East India Company. Soon after, he received priest’s orders, and on 11th August, 1796, sailed from Portsmouth, England, for Calcutta, where he landed 10th March, 1797. In May following he proceeded to the military station of Barackpore. But it was not till the beginning of the present century that he fairly developed his plans for the extension of the Redeemer’s Kingdom in India.—From Memoirs of Rev. Claudius Buchanan.
APPENDIX (Page [254]).
In the month of September, 1794, a paper was published in the Evangelical Magazine, urging the formation of a mission to the heathen on the broadest possible basis. The writer of that paper was the Rev. David Bogue, D.D., of Gosport, Hampshire, and two months after its appearance a conference, attended by representatives from several Evangelical bodies, was held to take action in the matter. The result was an address to ministers and members of various churches, and the appointment of a committee to diffuse information upon the subject. Thereafter, and in September, 1795, a large and influential meeting, extending over three days, at which the Rev. Dr. Harris preached from Mark xv: 16, and the Rev. J. Burder and the Rev. Rowland Hill and many others took part. At that meeting the society was formed, and it was resolved, with reference to its agents and their converts, “That it should be entirely left with those whom God might call into the fellowship of His Son among them, to assume for themselves such a form of church government as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word of God.”
The Rev. David Bogue, D.D., has therefore well been styled “the father and founder” of the institution.
APPENDIX (Page [256]).
At a meeting held in Leeds, 5th October, 1813, it was resolved to constitute a society to be called “The Methodist Missionary Society for the Leeds District,” of which branches were to be formed in the several circuits, whose duty it should be to collect subscriptions in behalf of missions and to remit them to an already existing committee in London. It was from this point that, by general consent, the origin of the Wesleyan Missionary Society is reckoned.