receive an outward ordination (as he certainly may receive an inward call) to a new sphere of action in the Church, as well as to a new office in it. I do not say that this has ever been the practice of the Church, though I still think that something very analogous to it may be found in Acts xiii. But I say this to show the difference between the two cases of re-baptizing and re-ordaining, and that the same risk of profanation does not attach to the last as, I admit, does in every doubtful case to the former.

Accordingly, I need not remind you that the great body of ancient Christians allowed the validity of baptism (the matter and words being correct), whether conferred by heretics, schismatics, or laymen. But though the ancient Church never rebaptized, they most certainly re-ordained in the case of the Meletian and Novatian clergy, as appears from Theodoret, Eccles. Hist., 1. i. ix., and Conc. Nicen., can. 8.

"Still, I have no right or desire to judge devout and learned divines of another national Church. If they come to sojourn among us, satisfied with the commission which they have received, or if they desire our help in their efforts to convert the heathen, I gladly meet them as Christians and fellow-labourers. I rejoice sincerely that Christ is made known so widely through their means. I gladly admit them (as I should desire myself to be admitted in Germany or Holland) to the communion of our Church, and to all that interchange of good-will and good offices (as in the case of the missionary societies of our Church) which is essential to our carrying on the Gospel work in concert. But I am not inconsistent with these feelings if I think that the difference between us, though it should not interrupt our communion, is in itself a misfortune to be remedied. Nor do I feel the less love and reverence for their character and talents when I earnestly wish them to become in all points like ourselves, except those sins of infirmity, of which I am mournfully conscious."

Accordingly, on St. Andrew's Day 1825, Bishop Heber had held an ordination in St. John's Cathedral, when the Rev. T. Reichardt of Basel, Rev. W. Bowley, and Rev. Abdool Massee'h, Henry Martyn's convert, all having already received Lutheran ordination, were admitted to the order of deacons, and on the 21st December to the order of priests. Mr. Robinson thus records the double events :—

"CALCUTTA, 30th November.

". . . All the clergy dined with the Bishop this evening. We were nineteen at table--the largest number of clergy ever present at one time in India. I sat by Abdool Massee'h, and we had a great deal of talk in Persian, as he speaks no English. After the usual toasts of 'The Preacher and his Sermon,' and 'The newlyadmitted Deacons,' the Bishop gave 'The Native Church at Agra and its founder, Mr. Corrie.'"

"21st December.

"How delightful have been the interesting solemnities of today! Abdool Massee'h and the others who were before admitted deacons were ordained priests. Archdeacon Corrie preached an excellent sermon, in which you will easily imagine his feelings almost overcame his utterance, for they were all in some sense his children. Mr. Adlington, a young missionary whom he had educated almost entirely, was ordained deacon at the same time. Poor Abdool Massee'h has been ill some days, and was quite overpowered by the service; he nearly fainted after the act of ordination. The good Bishop went through the Hindostani part of the service without difficulty. One of the most interesting solemnities of our Church at all times is the admission of new candidates to the sacred office, and the pledge so solemnly demanded and willingly given, which separates them for ever from the secularities of the world to the stewardship of God's family. But the peculiar circumstances of this country, the tried and well-known character of the men themselves, and the bright prospects of futurity which opened on the mind even from this early and partial dawn, all conspired to make the scene before us one of deeper and more powerful interest. It was an awful and touching moment when the Veni Creator was sung by the congregation, the Bishop reading the verses from the altar, surrounded by twenty of his clergy kneeling in their surplices. All seemed to feel the beautiful devotion of this heavenly hymn, and to join with one heart in the sublime invocation of the ever-blessed Spirit. Who can doubt that such prayers were answered? Father Abraham was present with his vicar during the whole service. He embraced the Bishop at the door of the vestry, and I attended him to his carriage, where he and Ter Joseph embraced me, and expressed their pleasure at thus joining with us, and their sense of the honour with which they had been received.

"All the clergy dined with the Bishop in the evening, where I had the pleasure of having the venerable Abdool Massee'h by my side. He speaks Persian with perfect fluency, and much greater purity than most of the learned Musalmans in this country. He has great urbanity and courtesy of manners, beautifully and harmoniously blended with the gravity which becomes his advanced age, his fervent piety, and his sacred office. His conversation is varied and accomplished, and is not only marked by the knowledge of the world which his former life and his missionary labours have naturally given him, but adorned with the lighter elegancies of the Persian classics, and enriched with the rare accompaniment of good taste and judicious reflection. Its peculiar charm, however, is the happy adaptation of the exquisite expressions of Saadi and Nizami, which are familiar to him, to the purposes of Christian feeling. This happy talent has made him very acceptable to the more educated among his countrymen, and he is a welcome visitor at the Court of Oudh, where the King has more than once engaged him in conversation on the subject of Christianity, and in controversy on its evidences and doctrines with some of his learned Moollahs. He often meets with hard names and angry looks from the more bigoted amongst them; but his soft answer generally turns away their wrath, and while they hate his religion, they are still constrained to admire the man. He drank wine with me at dinner, but it was only to avoid the rudeness of a refusal; and he explained to me afterwards that he very seldom touches it, and would rather abstain from what might lessen his influence among the Mohammedans. I fear he carries this abstinence beyond his strength, for the infirmities of age are fast growing on him, and he requires a more generous diet. He seemed much pleased with the distinguished kindness and respect the Bishop paid him, but it was the pleasure of a man who valued the distinction for the sake of him who conferred it, and who loved the praise of God more than the praise of men."

"22nd December.

"... The Bishop's conversation this evening was remarkably brilliant and entertaining. It happened to turn on a great variety of subjects, and displayed the riches of his memory, and his playful and happy fancy. The description he gave us of the meetings in Wales, which he had witnessed, for competition in music and poetry, was very interesting, particularly the rusticity of the candidates for fame, literally the coarsest and humblest persons.

He was present on the occasion with Lady Harriet Wynne, who declared herself so delighted at what she heard, that she expressed her intention of having her son, then lately born, educated in Welsh as well as English. The Bishop having announced this for her, the company received it with glad applause, and a peasant in blue worsted stockings, who had not been a competitor for the prize, stepped forth and pronounced some beautiful couplets in answer, of which something like this is the substance: 'Strike the harp with the hand of joy, for two messages of joy are brought to us-that our chief still loves his people, and that a child is born to his house. What shall I prophesy of the boy that is born? Brave of heart like Cadwallon, and tuneful as the bards of old. May he live, and may his hand perform the deeds of Cadwallon, and his harp echo the strains of Taliessin!' was a man with the rough manners and coarse dress of a Welsh peasant!"

This

The station of Chinsurah, adjoining the oldest of the Company's settlements in Bengal at Hoogli, was this year ceded by the Dutch, and the quaint old church fell to be supplied by Bishop Heber. He settled Mr. Morton as missionarychaplain there, and he was welcomed by Mr. Mundy of the London Missionary Society, and by Mr. Lacroix, missionary from the Netherlands, who now joined that Society. Heber and Lacroix, who became the greatest preacher in Bengali down to his death, forty years after, were men of apostolic spirit, and worthy of each other. After preaching twice on 8th January 1826, and next day examining a long-deserted house amid a jungly garden, with the view of making it the parsonage, Bishop Heber was seized with the same deadly fever which, under similar circumstances, had been the cause of Dr. John Leyden's death. The disease affected his head, making him deaf for a long time, a circumstance to which his wife ascribed the last fatal event in the bath at Trichinopoly three months after.

Like Henry Martyn, Reginald Heber was always the friend of the Armenian people and their Church-older than Con

1 The mission here was soon after given up by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and was made over by the London Missionary Society to the Free Church of Scotland, which has long had a College and an Evangelistic and Medical Mission at Hoogli-Chinsurah.

stantine. From their centre of Echmiatzin, under the shadow of Ararat, they are to be found in cities so remote as Ispahan and Cairo, Calcutta and Bombay, Constantinople and Petersburg, Moscow and Amsterdam. The oldest of Christian peoples, the Gregorian Armenians are the finest and least effete of the Oriental Churches. To the commercial virtues of the Jews they add the historic claims and high character of the earliest Christian kingdom. In Calcutta and Chinsurah they have long formed a community respected at once for their intellectual culture and active loyalty. Even of the United Armenians of the Roman Mechitarist order on the Venetian isle of San Lazzaro, Byron wrote, when his better nature asserted itself, as "the priesthood of an oppressed and noble nation, which has partaken of the proscription and bondage of the Jews and the Greeks, without the sullenness of the former or the servility of the latter." With their picturesque church of St. Nazareth, in its quadrangle of old gravestones, shut in from the bustle of the China Bazaar of Calcutta, Heber was familiar.

On his arrival from Ceylon the Bishop of Calcutta found waiting for him the Vertapet Abraham, sent from his convent on Mount Sion by the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem as commissary to the churches in India. How he took part in the ordination of priests and deacons in St. John's Cathedral has been told. Attended by Ter Joseph, the vicar of Calcutta, and Messrs. Jacob and Avdall (the last about to print his translation of the History of Armenia2 by Michael Chamich), Abraham visited Bishop's College. "I read over to Father Abraham our Bishop's letter to the Syrian Metropolitan in Malabar," writes Robinson. "He was exceedingly delighted with it. It is apostolic,' said he, 'like one of St. Paul's.''

In the last of his letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury, written when he was beginning his voyage to Madras, Bishop Heber expressed the hope that in the six months before August 1826 he might, by God's blessing, "complete the circuit of the southern stations of the Presidency of Madras and the SyroMalabaric Churches in Travancore, besides paying a short visit to Ceylon." He sought directions and assistance in enabling the 1 See Good Words, The Armenians, their Past and Future," vol. xix. 2 In two volumes, printed at Bishop's College Press, Calcutta, 1827.

"