Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/353

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THE REV. HARRY WILSON, M.A.
305

Canon Luckock, the present Dean of Lichfield. For five years he was curate of St Andrew's, Rugby. Then he became a pluralist, being appointed Rector of Over Worton and Vicar of Nether Worton, in Oxfordshire. The total number of inhabitants in the former place was sixty, and in Nether Worton forty. There used to be morning service in one church and afternoon service in the other, and the people being good churchgoers as country people go, used for the most part to attend both churches.

The way in which Mr Wilson came to make the radical change from two country parishes to an East-End Vicarage he, on one occasion, told the people of St Augustine's in these terms:—"When I had been at Worton some nine months I happened to go to the Church Congress, which was held that year in Derby. There I met Bishop Walsham How, then Bishop of Bedford. He had been an old friend of my father's, and he knew Worton and all about it. We met at a street corner, and we talked, perhaps, for two minutes. I told him I wanted to come and work under him in East London. I had not the most remote idea of what East London was like. He told me to write to him as soon as it was practicable and he would try to arrange an exchange. He spoke to me in the kindest manner, as the son of his old friend, and that was all that passed. Six months later I wrote to him to say that my way

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