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his inspired forecast and anticipation of the Church rising to a sense of the dignity and excellence and glory of its high commission to possess itself of the Arabic tongue in order to reach the Arab heart, has been most seasonable, and will act, I pray God, as a most powerful constraint to many (to myself among others in my riper years) to seek to realize the dramatic, but no less true, picture his glowing words express of a new impulse and enthusiasm seizing the heart of a goodly band of Christ's young soldiers and servants of the type of Mackay, O'Flaherty, and Hannington, and Bishops Steere and Smythies, to undertake a fresh spiritual crusade, to roll back the tide of Arab conquest, and plant the cross above the crescent: not because we are Westerns and Anglo-Saxons, and because it is a proud thing to raise racial and national trophies, but in the way in which Henry Martyn realized so graciously St. John's own standard of missionary excellence, and reached its hidden spring and source of mysterious power, when he wrote the simple words: 'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us;' 'He that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.'

I am free to confess that the particular line of thought and witness you have by patient, painstaking research extracted from the very pith and marrow of Martyn's Diary and Correspondence (a work, by-the-by, for whose reprint I have often pleaded in vain, and for which all that there is of mission-life in our Church would plead, had it not been so long out of print and out of sight) has helped to encourage me in undertaking this journey of missionary inquiry, to say the least, to which I have felt bound to address myself: too late in life, I regret to think. To many younger and abler men than myself may your words, or rather Martyn's words as reproduced and reechoed by you, carry home in heart and conscience, and make effectual to abiding purpose and energetic action, St. Paul's impressive exhortation: that ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.'

It has been my privilege and happiness to come across, in my Eastern journeys, the footprints of Martyn, and one like-minded with him in spirit, George Maxwell Gordon, the martyr of Candahar e.g. in Patna, the native city adjoining Martyn's cantonment charge at Dinapoor, in Cawnpore, and in Shiraz.

In the first of these I had made an agreement (which through some error of time or place did not take effect) to meet a celebrated moollah, who would have rejoiced the heart of Martyn, if he could have anticipated the uprising in so bigoted a city of such a bold confessor of Christ, who wrote of himself, some two years since to Robert Clark, as follows:-'I am one of the warmest and heartiest champions of the Christian faith in India. I spend my life, time, means, in its defence.

I have read most of the expositions and apologies of the Christian Scriptures. I am thoroughly persuaded of the truth of the Bible, and of the gospel of Christ. All my faith and hope lies there. I will, while life lasts, spare no pains and endeavours to bring over my Moslem brethren to the faith and love of the Gospel.'

I am reminded of a scene, of which I was witness in Shiraz, which, if Martyn's sainted spirit could have been present to behold, it must have been gladdened and refreshed. I was called to visit, in a garden villa on the outskirts of that lovely oasis in the midst of a howling desert, a mujtahid (Moslem archbishop) with a group of disciples seated around him on the house-top. I presented him with a well-bound copy of the entire Bible in Persian, which he first put to his lips and kissed, then laid reverently on his head in token of profound respect, then spread open before him and held in his arms, and read out of it portions which he recommended to the admiring regards of his disciples.

To the more seriously minded women of our Church your burning words can add least: they are coming to be full of fire and force already in the great cause which is one main feature of this new epoch of our Church history. They may add much to the laymen of our Church, especially to the mercantile element in their midst, which for every £10,000 of gains won by the soul-destroying sale of rum and fire-arms barely returns £10 for the soul-saving spread of the word of truth and kingdom of Christ.

Most of all they need to rouse our clergy afresh, AS A BODY, from the deep slumber and callous lethargy and stupor with which they regard the missionary cause, i. e. the solemn duty of practically espousing it, a matter of which it causes me profound regret to speak so strongly, but in which all my experience-not least during this last visit home-compels me to concur with a remark made to that effect recently by one of our leading speakers on missionary subjects.

I must close this, alas! as my time is exhausted, having to preach for Bishop Blyth's fund this evening, but remain, with very true regards,

Yours in brotherly sympathy,

THOS. V. FRENCH, Bishop.

This letter shows the bishop at work till the very end. He had come to Dover to spend the last Sunday in quietness with Mrs. French, and he was much refreshed by the services that he attended-early Communion and Morning Prayer at Holy Trinity, and Evensong at St. Bartholomew's. At this service he preached his last sermon in England, on behalf of Bishop Blyth's fund, from the verse, ‘Awake,

LAST HOURS IN ENGLAND

329 O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.' Next day at noon he parted from his wife on Dover pierhead-'a harder wrench than ever' -and soon was on his way to Paris, never to see his native land again.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE JOURNEY TO MUSCAT BY TUNIS AND THE

RED SEA LITTORAL.

'On eût bien voulu lui faire entendre qu'il prenait trop sur lui. J'eus même la confiance de le lui représenter: mais ce bon pasteur à l'imitation du grand apôtre comptait sa vie pour rien: il ne répondit autre chose à ces remontrances, sinon que quand il aurait donné son âme pour ses ouailles, il aurait alors rempli lidée du vrai pasteur. Jusque là, ajouta-t-il, je n'aurai rien fait de trop.'-VIE DE FÉNÉLON.

'Love and labour are two roses whose lustre sparkles on the bough of near access to God.'-ABD-UL-KADIR.

THE account of the bishop's last journeyings may best be given in extracts from his letters home:

TO MRS. FRENCH.

Grand Hotel, Tunis, Nov. 7, 1890. To have been with you.. on the 3rd, and to write to you hence on the 7th, would have seemed a wondrous impossibility fifty years ago, yet that is but one of the many wonders of the great half-century so brimful of change and movement, while one hopes that much has been done to set forward the kingdom that cannot be moved; so the Immoveable, the I Am, works His will and has His way amid the moving and shifting of human things.

We got off from Marseilles about 4 p.m. on the 5th as promised, and, as I expected, were no sooner out of port than we got well tossed and beaten about with high seas. . . . It seemed of good and happy omen to me that my steamer was called St. Augustin. I told the captain that I had never found a steamer yet so named. All the afternoon, or most of it, we coasted Sardinia, quite a new country to me, but it seemed bare and bleak with its white rocks. I was almost the only first-class passenger. Everything was beautifully clean and well ordered, and nothing but civility was shown. The passage was pledged for thirty-six hours, but it was only thirty-three, for at 5 a.m. this morning I woke to

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find ourselves anchored at Goletta, the port of Tunis, right in sight of ancient Carthage and the scene of St. Augustine's labours, at present, however, the scene of Cardinal Lavigerie's labours; his archbishopric takes the title of Carthage, having been transferred by the Pope from Algiers. I credit the Pope with wishing to revive the old empire of Carthage here, as he seeks to do that of old Nineveh at Mosul, all in honour of the Roman see. On a height which may have been the old citadel of Carthage. . . the cardinal has built a fine cathedral with a Benedictine convent adjoining, all of brilliant white (marble probably), with a museum of relics dug out of the ruins of Carthage. In the bright sunshine this morning it looked glistering and smiling enough. . . . It has been a journey full of mercies, and scarcely the smallest fatigue: only too comfortable and easy for one who would be a missionary!...

A prayer of Scudamore's seems full of help and comfort to me. (I left you my old dog's-eared copy, how generous of me, and have bought a new copy to be dog's-eared too if I live, I hope.) It begins, O God, the Father of lights, grant that by Thy grace I may be so ordered in Thy faith and fear that in all perplexities and doubts I may be safe under the heavenly guidance of Thy blessed Spirit.'

I think it is called A prayer under perplexity for guidance.' Let us try often to use it. . . with special reference to each other, and I think that A. and B. and W. will like it too, for there are perplexing doubts to all of us in our various histories and prospects.

Everybody here speaks French or Arabic, and as these two I have been specially working at, I seem strangely at home with the people straightway, only not fluent, of course, or happy in the use of choice words. The Arabs seem quieter in manner than in Egypt, but splendid specimens of humanity. I would to God I might be the bearer of a blessing spiritually to some of them, but it seems almost too good to hope with my small residue of strength, yet to be in my old, old work again, or in the prospect and attempted renewal of it, is the only compensation I could have to make up to me in part for this temporary separation! . . .

TO MRS. FRENCH.

Tunis, Nov. 10, 1890.

The cardinal is not here at present, but on his temperance. tour, I suppose. He is not greatly respected here, it seems, being thought by the Romanists too worldly-minded and time-serving, and more anxious to spread Roman supremacy than the kingdom of Christ. He has done much to exalt Carthage into a new dominion and power in the world, and has got most of the prizes at the Paris Exposition for the finest vines and wines in which Carthage excels! Rather strange for a temperance orator! What would Canon Wilberforce say?...