during their time, and did much to prepare the way of the missionary. Thus Claudius Buchanan helped more than any other man to create the public opinion which opened India to missionaries, and led to the consecration of the first bishop for all India, the Bishop of Calcutta. Thomas Thomason was the father of James Thomason, who, as Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, ruled (and taught others to rule) in the fear of God, and with the warmest sympathy for missionary enterprise. Through him, when the Punjab was annexed in 1849, it felt the influence which had flowed from the rooms of Charles Simeon at Cambridge.
SECRETARIES of the CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY
REV THOMAS SCOTT 1799-1802
(L. COSSÉ pinxt)
REV. JOSIAH PRATT 1802-1824
(H. WYATT pinxt)
REV. E. BICKERSTETH 1824-1830
(ALEX. MOSSES pinxt)
REV. WILLIAM JOWETT 1832-1840
REV HENRY VENN 1841-1872
(G RICHMOND R. A. pinxt)
REV HENRY WRIGHT
1872-1880
REV F E WIGRAM 1880-1895
(PHOTO ELLIOTT & FRY)
REV H E FOX appointed 1895
(PHOTO ELLIOTT & FRY)
Robert A Shield 99
The name of Edward Bickersteth seems a natural succession to that of Simeon. The influence of both is still unexhausted. When the Church Missionary Society kept its second Jubilee in November, 1898, the sermon was preached by Bishop E. H. Bickersteth, the son of Edward Bickersteth. And the influence had been wider than the limits of any one Society, for Bishop Edward Bickersteth, of Japan, who died in 1897, represented another generation in this line of truly apostolic succession.
Edward Bickersteth had been a solicitor in prosperous circumstances when zeal for missions led him to take holy orders, and join the Church Missionary Society as Assistant Secretary in 1816. Almost at once he was sent to examine the Society's work at Sierra Leone. There he admitted the Society's first African converts to the Holy Communion. In 1824 he succeeded Josiah Pratt in the Secretaryship of the Society. He was never an autocrat in the sense that Henry Venn was; but his work for the Society in the country was enormous. It has ceased to be the kind of work which is mainly done by the Honorary Secretary of the Society, but at that period it was work which was of inestimable value. It was the more important because public opinion at home still presented a front of mingled contempt and indifference to missions, whilst abroad the outlook was far from hopeful.
ZENANA WORK. BIBLE SELLING IN EASTERN BAZAARS.
TEACHING THE YOUNG.
LECTURING TO CHINESE HELPERS. ITINERATING THROUGH THE VILLAGES.
SOME METHODS OF WORK.
A greater figure than that of Edward Bickersteth in the annals of the Church Missionary Society is that of Henry Venn. Here, too, the name appears in more than one generation. The first Henry Venn belongs, with Wesley, Whitfield, Romaine and others, to the beginnings of the Evangelical Revival. Then comes John Venn, who took the chair at "The Castle and Falcon" meeting. Then, in 1834, Henry Venn the younger, the son of John Venn and grandson of the first Henry Venn, began regularly to attend the Society's Committee. He was Hon. Secretary in 1841, and held office for thirty-one years. He is the standard by which, doubtless, for generations to come, Hon. Secretaries of the Church Missionary Society will be compared. He was a strong man in every sense; a statesman and an autocrat. But, like some other autocrats, he clung to his work too long. He resigned only a few months before his death, and left the Society in a condition of discouragement, from the failure both of candidates for the mission field and of means for carrying on the work. Under his successor, Henry Wright (who was drowned in Coniston Lake in 1880), the Society began almost at once to enter upon new life and activity. Here again the hereditary influence, so manifest in the work of the Church Missionary Society, is evident, for four of his children went to the mission field. His successor, Frederic Wigram, was one of the most munificent benefactors the Society ever had. He died, after resigning office, worn out by its responsibility and toil. He, too, has sent children to the mission-field. In his successor, the Rev. H. E. Fox, the hereditary impulse is manifest again. Mr. Fox's father was one of the founders of the Society's Telugu mission, and one of the most devoted of its workers in the foreign field.
And now let us glance for a moment at some of the Society's agents abroad. The task of selection is difficult. There are names on the list that all men who care for missions have heard of. Samuel Marsden, Samuel Crowther, Valpy French, Pfander, John Horden, James Hannington, Alexander Mackay—these, to name but a few, and many others, are familiar far outside the limits of the Society's own friends. But there are more, less widely known, whose work deserves not a whit less to be had in remembrance.
(From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society.)
CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY'S TRAINING COLLEGE AT AGRA.
(With students in foreground.)
Amongst these was William Johnson, one of the first missionaries to Sierra Leone. He went out in 1816, and began an extraordinary work amongst the slaves released by British cruisers and landed at Sierra Leone. He died on the voyage home to England at the early age of thirty-four. Those were the days in which to face work in Sierra Leone meant facing a peril so imminent that each volunteer needed the courage of those who go upon a forlorn hope.
There was William Williams, first a surgeon and then, after graduating at Oxford, ordained for work in the Colonies. He went to New Zealand in 1825, when its people were a race of cannibals, not one of whom professed Christianity. He lived to see the whole country more or less fully evangelised. His wife died as recently as 1896, and his son, baptised in 1829 with the children of one of the most savage of the Maori chiefs, became Bishop of Waiapu in the land the father did so much to open up. William Williams had a brother, Henry Williams, who preceded him in the field. So great was the influence he won that, on the news of his death reaching two Maori camps, in which rival tribes were preparing to meet in battle, they at once proclaimed a truce, attended his funeral, and settled their differences in peace.
(Photo: G. P. Abraham, Keswick.)
MR. EUGENE STOCK.
(Editorial Secretary of the Society.)
(From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society.)
THE LIBRARY AT THE MISSION HOUSE.
There was Ludwig Krapf, whose name, with that of John Rebmaun, should ever be joined with the origins
