HOME LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE. 331 



To the Same. 

 Trinity College, Dublin, January 10th, 1860. 



Here I am sitting at home (by the fire ; my chair put close 

 in on the hearthrug, and the table pulled out of its centrical 

 place accordingly) while the rest of the good folk are gone to 

 chapel. I don't go to-day, not that I may take the opportunity 

 of writing to you, but because I am going by-and-by to St. 

 Stephen's to hear a man preach in a beard as big as Aaron's, or 

 bigger. You may well say, " What went you out for to see ? A 

 man in a beard ?" Not quite, for they may daily be seen in the 

 streets, but the preacher is (I hope) likely to be a useful and 

 perhaps famous man one of these days. He is going to be a 

 missionary under Archdeacon Mackenzie in South Central Africa, 

 and is to preach to-day for the mission, and as I am one of the 

 committee I want to hear him. You have heard no doubt of 

 the Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central Africa. Well, it 

 is now to be called " Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin (tria 

 juneta in unum) Mission." We have had a meeting in our hall, 

 and are fairly started ; and I hope " we three " (Universities) won't 

 " logger-heads be ;" but it is a great and a glorious undertaking. 

 Mackenzie (to be the first bishop in partibus from English 

 Church) was here at our meeting, and gave a most spirit-stirring 

 address, practical and business-like, and at the same time warm, 

 and poured forth like a gushing stream from an abundant 

 fountain. He is just the man to lead a band (not of "4000 

 who were murderers ") into the wilderness, but, like an Australian 

 squatter, to push forward the bounds of civilization into the un- 

 filled soil and establish his flocks securely and prosperously. As 

 he explained to us, simply, his proposed arrangements, I was 

 struck with the real poetry of one picture that he unwittingly 

 brought to my eye. He was explaining how they should first 

 settle the mission, before their houses were built and their 

 people gathered round them. As for themselves, why, the 

 native huts would shelter them, that was nothing. But how 

 was their church to be ? He told us then what makeshifts he 

 had to resort to in his colonial missionary work, and that they 

 now purposed to avoid these, and to start from the very 

 beginning with a thing set apart, consecrated to worship. So 



