Untitled - Electric Scotland

i86i-66] FOREIGN MISSIONS 327
In the early years of his London Episcopate he lost
no opportunity of expressing his interest in the subject,
speaking
three times in Exeter Hall in the course of a
single year, besides preaching the great C.M.S. sermon at
St. Bride s, and concerning himself actively in the ordinary
business of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
It was in those years that the complicated and difficult
question of Missionary Bishoprics came to the front, and
Bishop Tait took an active, and for the time an unpopular,
part in the discussions in Convocation and elsewhere.
The controversies which raged over the person and
office of Bishop Colenso were soon to force into promin
ence the whole question of the Colonial Episcopate : who
ought to appoint the Bishops how and through whom
were they to derive jurisdiction and to what disciplinary
authority were they subject. Already the importance
and the difficulty of these problems had become almost
painfully apparent. Up to that time (with the unique
exception of the so-called Bishopric of Jerusalem, which
was provided for by a special Act of Parliament) no
Bishop had anywhere been consecrated in connection with
the Church of England to exercise his functions altogether
outside the Queen s dominions. 1 The Bishops for India
and the Colonies were, one and all, appointed by the
Crown, and furnished with Letters Patent defining their
jurisdiction. As missionary work extended especially
in countries like South Africa where the heathen mission-
field bordered upon the Colonial Dioceses, it became
necessary to provide for the Episcopal oversight
of such
regions, and the question arose, By what legal process
could such Bishops be consecrated ? Clearly the English
Even Bishop M Dougall, consecrated at Calcutta, under Royal Letters
Patent in 1855, f r missionary work in the island of Borneo, preserved the
semblance of a Colonial Bishop by taking his title from the little island of
Labuan, a dependency of the English Crown.