paring his conduct, even when we think it ill-judged and unfortunate, with what Brethrenism has too often exhibited, who can refrain from crying, O si sic omnes!
The mission to Bagdad, though almost barren of registrable results, is one of the most interesting episodes in the whole of our story. A year after Groves left England a party of seven started to join him. It consisted of Cronin (who had just become a widower), his mother and sister, Parnell, Newman, Hamilton (an Irish Brother), and Cronin’s infant daughter. The party was detained for fifteen months at Aleppo. There Parnell married Miss Cronin, and lost her almost immediately by death. Hamilton returned to England, and scarcely had the little company at last succeeded in reaching Bagdad, in the early summer of 1832, when Mrs. Cronin also died.
It is an interesting fact that Wigram was only prevented at the last moment from joining this missionary band. That we thus get a list of almost all the names of men who had taken a leading part in the movement before 1830 is a striking proof, not only of the fervour of the zeal of the first Brethren, and of their readiness to stake everything on principles of action that may now appear to us rather visionary, but also of their superiority to any ambition to found a new sect. To follow Groves to Bagdad, on a mission that must be deemed singularly unpromising, was the prevailing passion in Dublin. If the little group there that furnished most of the makers of Brethrenism had the weakness of Quixotism, at least they had its strength and nobleness.
The zeal of the party was tried by heavy and protracted sorrow. When they reached Bagdad at last it was to enter a house of mourning. In March, 1831, the plague had broken out, and within two months more
