Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/142

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DISTINGUISHED CHURCHMEN

there is no Bishop who has treated the Society's work with more consideration than the Bishop of that island. Several of the Indian Bishops have themselves been engaged in direct missionary work before being raised to the Episcopate, such as Bishop Clifford of Lucknow and Bishop Hodges of Travancore, formerly missionaries of the C.M.S.; Bishop Lefroy of Lahore and the Bishop of Chota-Nagpur, formerly connected with the S.P.G.; and the Bishop of Madras, who was a member of the Oxford Brotherhood in Calcutta. In fact, the only Bishops who have not previously been missionaries are those of Calcutta, Colombo and Bombay, but they are all missionary-hearted men.”

“Of Eastern Equatorial Africa and Uganda something has been gleaned from Bishop Tucker. Your operations, however, extend beyond those particular districts?”

“Our operations in Africa extend from the West Coast up the Niger and to Sierra Leone, and we have lately been trying to get an entrance into the country called Hausaland in the Western Soudan, where is to be found a very fine race of people, followers of Islam. Our first missionaries in Africa were at Sierra Leone. It was the place at which the released captives from the slave-trading ships were landed, and it was among them, speaking several languages and representing many districts, that our Society was first led to undertake work, but for some years, to the shame of