accordingly took one myself, and appointed Messrs. Spens, Tribe, and Nugent, who seem all working with a heart, and we are all harmonious in action as regards arrangements.

Monday, March 30. Yesterday I held an early parade at 7.30 out on the great plain for the 9th Lancers, portions of Highlanders, and one battery of Artillery. Then at 11, sermon at station church, the Viceroy and Lady Dufferin and Sir Charles Aitchison and party being present. I contrasted our Lord's triumphal procession with that of these days at Rawul Pindi. I fear it was not as flattering as might have been expected to the latter. There was such a dense levée (9.30 the fixed time) at the Viceroy's state tent on Saturday evening that all was in sad confusion, natives and English all jumbled inextricably. I never saw anything imperial so disorderly done. I suppose the flocking together of such multitudes was unexpected, and much had to be extemporized. Then all the carriages were packed together in masses in all directions, and in the dark it was a hopeless search, so I begged a seat home in the first carriage I found driving my way (which turned out to be the Roman Bishop of Lahore's), and I was indebted to him for driving. me home (not to Rome, happily) about 10.40.

Easter Day. I missed seeing the Ameer after all. He came in just as early service commenced on Tuesday morning, and it was very wet also. There was to be a durbar in the afternoon, but in consequence of rain it was put off, and I left at 8 p.m.

Kohat, May 21. The accounts from Russia are very unfavourable, it appears to me, but people go on hoping. The officers are indignant, and think England is to be branded with ignominy. What is to come of it I know not. It is curious to see even Mr. Chamberlain refuses a deputation from the Peace Society. It looks serious that the Czar has sent a jewel-hilted sword to General Komaroff! Dear Agnes will be amused at the Maharanee of Baroda offering her services to form an army of Mahratta amazons to fight the Russians, and recounting what the Mahratta ladies, such as Ahilya Beg, did in the old annals of the confederacy. The Civil and Military hopes the ladies of India and England will follow her example. I think Agnes would like to be her A. D. C. ! It really seems as if this war were cementing a fresh union between the English and the Hindus. I am most of all surprised at the apparent loyalty of the Mohammedans."

But it was not in war alone, but in peace, that Bishop French was ever the soldiers' true friend. Among other efforts, he felt it needful to advocate the cause of temperance, and, amcngst other self-denials, he became a total abstainer. It was a self-denial, for the bishop was no enthusiast, and felt himself the better for the use of

TEMPERANCE.

SUNDAY REST

33

stimulants; indeed, from time to time he was forced to have recourse to them for his often infirmities.' In his temperance addresses he always put the gospel in the forefront, urging the soldiers to become true Nazarites, and not mere Rechabites; to make their total abstinence only a link in that chain of graces which, beginning with manliness, ended in brotherly kindness and love.

In a letter to Miss Brocklebank in the first year of his episcopate he said:

"Thus far, I think, those to whom my new work seems to have been most blessed are the British soldiers, but the natives keep their hold upon me rather determinately, and claim my sympathy and co-operation in what concerns them, and you may be sure this is no sorrow or trouble to me, whatever labour may be involved. Thus far I have been preserved wonderfully in health, more than I could have dared to hope, yet I feel it is a severe strain sometimes, and having felt it necessary to be a teetotaller (the soldiers in one camp made me take the pledge twenty-six times one night after a lecture! as they like my individualizing plan), I cannot take stimulants to keep up brain power. I hope I shall be able to get on without.'

Another point in which he showed himself the soldiers' friend was in protesting with all his influence, in public and in private, against all profanation of the day of rest :

'You and I,' he wrote to an officer of highest rank in one of the hill-stations, 'have great responsibilities, you greater than myself in some ways, and with responsibilities a greater influence, and you are not one who will think I ought to ask your pardon for pleading earnestly with you (as the chief pastor of the Church of Christ in this diocese) to exert that influence more wholly to the glory of God and the good of His Church—I mean as regards the observance of the Lord's Day and the services of the Church.

'In my visitation journeys, among other observations I could not fail to make this very especially, that the respect and reverence for God and holy things was affected to what we may feel a lamentable, but is yet perhaps a natural and inevitable, extent by the bearing and conduct of the chief officers, military more than civil, towards the house and worship of God.

If in any respect the manner of conducting the services should be objectionable, I shall feel very thankful if you will publicly or confidentially complain to me, that I may remonstrate and, if pos sible, make a change in the arrangements complained of.

If it be otherwise, allow me, dear sir, with the utmost courtesy and respect, which your kindness to myself personally and wellknown philanthropies must inspire, to exhort you in the name of the great Head of the Church to consider how greatly the exercise of influence has to do with the great account we must both render, and how deep the debt is we owe to Him of whose government one of the most recognized, and most righteous, and surely fulfilled laws is, "Them that honour Me, I will honour."

It has been already noticed how successfully on another occasion he appealed to General Roberts to defer a Sunday march. This was a point on which he was at all times ready to lay the greatest stress, and in 1882 he obtained a General Order on the subject:

'It having been brought to the notice of the Commander-in-Chief that in several instances lately the orders and customs of the service requiring troops on the line of march to halt on Sundays have been infringed, his Excellency directs that no movement of troops shall take place on a Sunday, except when absolutely unavoidable.'

As a preacher, the bishop might sometimes weary the patience of the soldier in that hot Indian climate by the length of his discourse, or shoot above the heads of all but the more thoughtful of his hearers. He tells goodhumouredly against himself the story of a general's wife who, after listening for three-quarters of an hour in the heart of the hot season, vowed she would never hear him preach again. But every soldier could appreciate his manifest sincerity, and when he went miles out of his way in the burning sun to minister to two or three in their sickness, or stripped off his coat in hospital to rub the limbs of some poor fellow writhing with pains of cholera, they recognized that in their own chief pastor they had one who understood their troubles, one who was ever ready to endure all hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ; and so it is no wonder they respected him-in many cases loved him for his work. That this is no exaggerated language two simple anecdotes may serve to show. On June 11 (St. Barnabas Day), 1885, the Bishop had been taking the parade service of a regiment, three miles from Murree, under the grand forest trees.

'I took,' he said, 'the character of Barnabas, and it seems to have attracted the men much. One of them gave an account of the whole sermon to Mr. in the evening. "Ah, sir," he said, "when the bishop put his hand up to his head and said, 'Why I with my grey hairs even want encouragement, how much more do you young men want encouragement such as Barnabas gave?' it seemed to give me quite a pain here in my heart, it affected me so."

On another occasion, when he was dining with the Artillery mess at Meean Meer, the colonel in command thanked him most warmly, in the presence of all the officers, for what he had done for them in a recent visitation of the cholera, and said with a bright smile, 'If there is a forlorn hope to be led, we will follow you to

a man.'

Thus both by men and officers his moral force was felt; and Captain Dunlop Smith, a former aide de camp at Government House, Lahore, and son of the latest biographer of Henry Martyn, has recently recorded his impressions thus:

'There is one striking feature of Bishop French's general influence which I had several opportunities of seeing, that is the effect his example, no less than his teaching, had on young men out here, those fine young fellows you meet in any Indian cantonment-men who are as plucky, honourable, and straight as one could wish for, but who don't think so much of the deeper purposes of their existence as they might. Several of these lads have told me, perhaps not directly, but none the less plainly, how the revelation Bishop French could not help giving to every one of his own big and chivalrous heart made them feel better men and do their round of parade or stables or whatever came to their hand with a keener sense of duty. With all his scholarship and culture he was simple and fearless, and the large sympathy he had with humanity in all its phases had its origin and inspiration in the highest teachings of his Master. I often think if he had been a soldier he would have been very like General Gordon.'

CHAPTER XVIII.

MISSIONARY WORK IN PERSIA.

Πάρθοι καὶ Μῆδοι καὶ Ἐλαμῖται . . . ἀκούομεν λαλούντων αὐτῶν ταῖς ἡμετέραις γλώσσαις τὰ μεγαλεῖα τοῦ Θεοῦ.-Acts ii. 9-12.

'I have wandered through many regions of the world, and everywhere have I mingled with the people. In each corner I have gathered something of good. From every sheaf I have gleaned an ear.'-The Persian poet, SADI.

'If we furnish Him (Christ) with candid, willing, unselfish disciples, ready to go where they are sent, to stay where they are bidden, to call nothing unpromising which He points to as a task for our attention, He will teach, He will plan, He will execute through us as surely as He did by His apostles.

'In the New Testament we see and hear Him exactly as He was in their lifetime and His own; through all the pages of history we mark the same living hand ruling and judging; and it ought not to be too hard, even in these striking, stirring times of our own, for faithful hearts to find His new paths of ever-changing progress, when He Himself has sent them to be His interpreters and pioneers, the living Christ, the thinking Christ, the speaking Christ, the reigning Christ, Emmanuel, God with us.'-ARCHBISHOP BENSON (at his enthronization, 1883; quoted in French's Persian diary).

Ir might be supposed that the vast provinces of the Punjab and Sindh would have afforded sufficient scope for the energies of one man, already worn with sickness and broken by remorseless and unsparing exposure to a tropic heat. But the same undaunted spirit which had carried Bishop French beyond the frontier to cheer our toiling troops at Candahar, carried him further still, when at the close of 1882 a plain call came to him to visit Persia, and confirm the souls of the disciples, and cheer the hearts of those who were there labouring to spread the kingdom of