Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/129

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

CHAPTER V

PREBENDARY HENRY ELLIOTT FOX, M.A.,

Hon. Secretary, Church Missionary Society.

SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD.

“There is in every human heart
Some not completely barren part,
Where seeds of love and truth might grow
And flowers of generous virtue blow;
To plant, to watch, to water there;
This be our duty—this our care.”—Bowring.

 

Origin of C.M.S.—Call to the World—Its Democratic Government—Past and Present Secretaries—Mr Fox and Bishop Tucker, of Uganda—Management of C.M.S. and S.P.G. compared—Enormous Expansion of the Work—India—Africa—China—Egypt—Building-up Native Churches in India and Africa—Lord Kitchener and Missionary Enterprise in Egypt—Generals, like Doctors, differ—Egypt controlled Contrary to Gordon's Idea—Insufficiency of Income

Every reader of Bleak House is familiar with Dickens's picture of “Poor Joe” sitting down to his humble breakfast upon the doorstep of a missionary society's establishment, and how “he admires the size of the edifice and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific, or

99