A History of Protestant missions in the near East

Syria and Palestine 239
To be sure, the episcopate was an accomplished fact within a
few months, but it was a specifically Anglican episcopate and
Prussia's influence upon it was almost nil. Prussia enjoyed
merely the honour of contributing ;600 a year towards the
salary of the bishop, and the right to appoint every alternate
bishop, who must, however, be an Anglican.
The British crown appointed Salomo Alexander, a learned
Jewish Christian, as the first bishop. He was a Polish Jew
from Prussian Posen, and was at that time a professor in a
college in London. But he died too soon to be able to display
any great activity. As his successor, King Frederick William
IV appointed Samuel Gobat, who had returned to Europe in
shattered health, after his romantic activity in Abyssinia (of.
Chap. VI, B, 1), and was principal of a mission college in
the island of Malta when Frederick William the Fourth's call
came to him. He accepted
it with joy. The history of his
thirty-three years' episcopate (1846-1879) has proved that the
King's choice was an excellent one. Whatever Protestant
missionary work there is at the present time in the Holy
Land is to be traced directly or indirectly to Bishop Gobat.
His sane, impressive and determined personality enabled
Protestant missions to take root in the stony soil of the
neglected country. When Bishop Gobat arrived in Jerusalem
in December, 1846, he encountered difficulties on every hand.
Though " Bishop of Palestine, Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia,"
he had but one parish in his diocese Jerusalem, with its forty
or fifty communicants; there were newly begun mission
stations for Jews only in Jaffa and Safed.
Outside Jerusalem,
his task, therefore, was to create a Protestant people. But
where ? Mission work amongst the Muhammadans was, to begin
with, out of the question, because of the suspicious
vigilance of the Turkish government. And to have won converts
from the Orthodox Greeks would have offended the
high church party in England, who regarded the Greek Church
as a sister, with equal ecclesiastical claims.
The labour of the Americans had spread some little knowledge
of evangelical truth in the Holy Land, in spite of the