CHAPTER XXI.

HOME LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE.

1877-1887.

"The letters of the noble dead

Are leaves that never lose their green.'

'He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me.'-S. Matthew x. 37, 38.

THE account of this Lahore episcopate could not be deemed complete without some extracts from the bishop's letters revealing something of his life in his own home and of the circumstances of his resignation.

His father's death, and the marriage of his eldest daughter Ellen in 1878 and of his second daughter Lydia in 1881, have been already mentioned.

The family event that left the deepest impress on his life was the long suffering from some spinal ailment of his youngest daughter Edith, which terminated in her death in 1885. It was this principally that led Mrs. French to return to England early in 1881, after the bishop's second synod, and to remain there till his last synod in 1885. Many letters to many friends of various degrees of rank and intimacy, expressing sympathy in varied trials, have come before the eyes of the biographer; but probably the bishop's ministry of consolation nowhere appears in such rich tenderness and fullness as in his correspondence with his muchloved child. At the time of the first letter quoted she was only thirteen years of age.

TO EDITH. (A Military Service and Musical Maina.)

MY VERY DEar little EdITH,

Meean Meer, April 28, 1878.

Your letter gladdened my heart; it was so full of your own dear natural self. How I long to look at your smiling face again, and have my Bible carried to a sideboard by a precious child. When will that be again? Perhaps in India some day.

I preached this morning to a large churchful of soldiers, some in white coats, and the Artillery in dark blue. Some come with their swords on, and they make such a clang and clatter when they touch the stony ground. There was a large bird, a sort of maina, larger than a starling, who came to church this morning and would not go: it came and perched on the top of the lectern, and when the choir began to sing and the organ to play it whistled and chirped with all its might. I am sorry to say the little choir-boys nearly all laughed. I hope Wilfrid and you would not have done so! The chaplain tried to catch it, and an officer tried to frighten it with his sword scabbard, but it was all no use. I forgot all about it when I began to preach on Hos. vi. 1, 2, 3, 'Come, and let us return unto the Lord, for He hath torn, and He will heal,' &c. The poor soldiers have nearly twothirds of them been sick with bad fever lately, which they brought with them from Jhansi, their former station. I told them that this was the tearing and smiting which came from God to them, and that He who tore could heal, and I hoped they too would say, 'Come, and let us return unto the Lord. After two days He will revive us.' I told them I thought it was appropriate for me to preach to them on that the first time I came among them as bishop. This made them all look up and behave very attentively. . . . I found two lines in an Afghan poet lately-God has made by His own power one city great, another small, not that every town becomes Delhi or Lahore.' So you see my little diocese has what the poet thought the two chief cities in the world! The other bishops would have something to say to that, I think. Even Mr. Robert Clark thinks I have been very greedy in getting so many hill stations in my diocese-Simla, Murree, Dalhousie, Dharmsala, &c., but what could I do? I never asked for them, I am sure. But I think all my dear eight sons and daughters might be at a separate hill station, and the list not quite exhausted. All this is a very small matter indeed if only our dear Saviour might have some more churches and congregations for His own, and come and set up His throne in the Punjab; then fine cities and hill stations would dwindle into nothing in our eyes, I hope.

Your very loving papa,

THOS. V. LAHORE.

EASTER-GREETING.

FIRST GRANDCHILD

149

To CYRIL.

Easter Day, April 13, 1879.

'O Kúpus ¿ynyéptai. I must greet you to-day with the old Easter Day salutation, for I must not doubt that to you, as to me, it has been a day of joy and refreshment, animating you in your pulpit and other ministrations with new power, energy, and success, I trust. It is always a great happiness to me to think of you as associated with me in the work of a shepherd and ambassador of souls. May your testimony be prolonged long after mine has been silenced by encroachment of age, decay, and death, and may your crown of rejoicing be far more richly and fully bejewelled than my own.

6

I was glancing at an interesting, rather free-thinking little book, unhappily, on the Conservation of Energy,' as regards the mechanical forces and working energies of the great powers of nature, inquiring how far we may look for those forces to go on working for indefinite ages, and how far we must anticipate their exhaustion. It struck me it would be interesting to compare these with the great divine supernatural forces which the Bible so much dwells upon, especially St. Paul, in whose mouth évépyeta and duvaus so often occur; so I have worked it up into as simple a sermon as I could for this Easter evening on Eph. i. 19, 20— the effectual force and energetic working in believers of the Resurrection power by which Christ our Lord was raised. Of course I have subordinated the metaphysical and scientific part of the subject to the spiritual and practical.

This morning I dwelt (in Hindustani), before a wonderful congregation of native Christians (some 200, of whom 75 were confirmed yesterday, and over 160 were present at the Lord's table this morning), on the destruction of Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea as the appropriate type of the open tomb of the Lord Jesus, round about which are strewn the corpses of the forgiven, obliterated, and subdued sins of His people, as set forth in Micah vii. so strikingly, not forgetting Rev. xv. You may be able to work out the thought more carefully some future Easter.

To MRS. KNOX. (On the Bishop's first grandchild.)

Lahore, April 28, 1879.

It seems as if I must write one line of hearty and affectionate congratulation and thanksgiving, dearest Ellen, before I write anything else to anybody, after receiving your dear husband's telegram, which it was very good and considerate of him indeed to send. How strange it seems that the good news should reach us the same day between four and five o'clock. Yourself and the precious gift bestowed on you will be much on my heart in prayerful remembrance and sympathy, for I know how full the

overflow of joy is with which one welcomes the expected firstborn. . . . I cannot at all realize as yet that I am a grandfather: when I do I shall begin to feel how old I am getting. I wish my beloved father could have been spared that little while to be a great-grandparent. I must not add more to-day than the prayer that He will turn His hand on the little one in the sense of guidance and guardianship as well as blessing.

To CYRIL. (On his entering Priest's Orders.)

Lahore, May 21, 1879.

In the midst of visitation journeyings (I am only in here for half a day) I find it difficult to collect my thoughts to write to you in connexion with such a deeply interesting occasion as your admission to Priest's Orders; yet I like you to know that these events of your spiritual history do not pass by unnoticed and unremembered. .. Your work seems to grow upon your hands a little faster than is profitable, as I find it in my own experience, and I felt rebuked by what I saw in the Guardian mentioned of the new Bishop of Lichfield', that he refuses many invitations to preach on the ground that he must secure time for devotional exercises-in the way of 'quiet days,' I suppose, and such special secessions from the crowd and press of extraordinary, added to ordinary, calls. Alas! I groan heavily sometimes under the same inevitable pressure, and my quietest days for reflection and meditation are those spent in the railway or the wayside inn in the hot weather, when to travel between ten and three is almost perilous; but even then arrears of correspondence sometimes rear their threatening piles before my face, and will only be reduced in dimensions by patient steady effort.

To-morrow is Ascension Day, and I have been trying to meditate on its great and glorious themes in their practical as well as doctrinal and historical bearings, for without the former one is distressed to see how the two latter are listened to callously and heedlessly-as very proper indeed, but not in the least ruffling the calm and evenness of men's worldly life. . . . I feel convinced that I want more depth, holiness, and unction of love in my ministrations, and that till my character itself grows in these, the results of the ministry will be feeble, and the profiting will not appear. I was struck by a remark of Tauler's this morning-it helped me a little; speaking of the Apostles, he says, 'The Eternal Father drew them upwards that He might reign as a Master in them. Hence it was needful that they should be drawn out of themselves, because they could not be free, at one, noble, and loving, so long as they were held captive to self. Their nature was not

1 Dr. Maclagan.

WELL-DOING.

NEWMAN'S SERMONS

151

extinguished, for they were much more truly according to their nature in their self-surrender, than they had ever been before.'

It is a great temptation to me to try and do one's best always, for though this seems all right, yet one's best is one's own best, and I want to have the calm self-possession which makes all one's efforts rest in God, not extinguishing effort, but calming it by consecrating it. It is a great fear of the world and courting of its praise to be always toiling and moiling to avoid being thought idle, and so not being, or too seldom being with Christ in His mount of wrestling and prayer.

To MRS. SHELDON. (On his Churchmanship.)

Dalhousie, July 18, 1879.

I fear you think me too High Church in my views, but the bitterness of the attacks on our Church here are such, and its discipline and good order have sunk so low, that I feel bound to carry out and act upon my strong views as to the Prayer-book being the thorough and only wholesome representative of primitive catholic truth and order. If we abnegate our discipline and priestly functions (up to the point our prayer-book and reformers inherited and laid claim to them), what remains but that Rome should step in and snatch triumphantly the spoil? However, say or do what I will, I always go down for a Low Churchman. People do not care about ritual, but they do resent being preached to about conversion, and being told that all are not Israel that are of Israel, and that the friendship of the world is enmity with God. All that Canon makes evangelicalism to consist of they will listen to with indifferency, and sleep it out-JustificationImputation-what care they about such things? But to be waked up, when they want to sleep; to be told they must have oil as well as the lamp, is intolerable, and to be resisted. The world's notion of well-doing is faulty and defective: it is well-doing with the cross borne and such well-doing as Christ's was, which will always involve the cross-to which we are called.

To CYRIL. (On Newman's Sermons.)

Dharmsala, July 25, 1879.

A case deeply interested me to-day of a very thoughtful lady who has been a professed unbeliever with her husband, but seems under very serious concern about her soul, and told me to-day the light was now dawning upon her. A volume of Newman's Sermons I lent her has helped her greatly, which will surprise you. The fact is, the extreme solemnity and reverential spirit for sacred things, and the close analysis of the heart and its workings, with manifest sympathy for persons under difficulties, with a considerable amount interspersed of direct dogmatic teaching, combined