itation at Umballah, he had his first
serious illness, a fever, he being then in his sixty-sixth year and in
the thirteenth of his residence in India. For about a week he was in
great danger, but rallied, and was able to be removed by slow stages,
though not without an attack of inflammation on the lungs before reaching
Calcutta; and his constitution was altogether so much shaken that he was
ordered home, without loss of time, to recruit his health.

He returned to England by the Overland route, and after a short respite
recovered much of his strength, so as to be able to preach in many
churches and appear at numerous meetings; and in a year's time the
vigorous old man was on his way back to his diocese, where he arrived in
time to keep the Christmas of 1846, just two years after he had been
stricken down by fever. In the October of the next year he consecrated
his cathedral, towards which 20,000_l._ had been his own donation, half
towards the building, half towards the endowment. His strength was not
quite what it had been before, but he still had abundant energy, and new
branches of the Church were springing up around him; not only the three
dioceses that had branched from his own in India, but Ceylon had a Bishop
of its own, Australia had five, and the Cape and New Zealand and the Isle
of Hong Kong had each received a Bishop. The principle had come to be
recognized that to send out isolated workers without a head to organize
was a plan that could hardly be reasonably expected to succeed; and in
the long run prosperity has certainly attended the contrary arrangement.
Not to speak of the Divine authority, the action of a body under a
recognized head and superior on the spot must be far readier of
adaptation to circumstances than that of a number of equals, accountable
only to some necessarily half-informed Society at home.

In his 73rd year, just after a visitation tour, it somewhat dismayed
Bishop Wilson to find a letter from the Bishop of London sending him to
consecrate the new church erected by Sir James Brooke, at Sarawak. Few
careers have been more remarkable than that of the truly great man who
subdued Malay piracy, and gained the confidence of the natives of Borneo;
and when the effort of the fourteen weeks' voyage had been made, the
Bishop returned full of joy and hope, and not long after, together with
the Bishops of Madras and Victoria, joined in consecrating the missionary
Bishop of Labuan to the new f