Book Description

Excerpt from The Life of John Wilson, D.D. F. R. S: For Fifty Years Philanthropist and Scholar in the East When, a year ago, I was asked by his son to go over the voluminous papers and write the life of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, I at once sacrificed other engagements to the duty. As Editor of the Calcutta Review for some time before the Mutiny of 1857, and as Editor of The Friend of India and Correspondent of The Times for many years after it, I was called to observe and occasionally to discuss the career of the Philanthropist and Scholar of Western India. For forty-seven years as a public man and a missionary he worked, he wrote, he spoke, and in countless ways he joyfully toiled for the people of India. While viceroys and governors, officials and merchants, scholars and travellers, succeeded each other and passed away all too rapidly, he remained a permanent living force, a mediator between the natives and the governing class, an interpreter of the varied Asiatic races, creeds, and longings, to their alien but benevolent rulers. Nor was his work for his own countrymen less remarkable, in its degree, than his life of self-sacrifice for Hindoos and Muhammadans, Parsees and Jews, outcastes and aborigines, and his building up of the indigenous Church of India. His influence maintained an English standard of morality and manners in society, while he was the centre of a select group of administrators, not confined to Bombay, like Sir Donald M'Leod, to mention only the dead. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.