14 The First C.M.S. Mission in Egypt.

impressed with the steadfastness and patient continuance in well-doing of the little band of missionaries. They were sorely tried. Now it was cholera, which carried off a child of Mr. Krusé’s; now it was plague; now it was peril through the political situation, leading the Hon. Captain Waldegrave, R.N., who for six years had been a member of the C.M.S. Committee and who was then in command of H.M.S. Revenge, to offer his help; now, again, it was cholera, which laid low all but one of the European staff. And beyond all this there was the disappointment which they had to endure. From time to time there were gleams of encouragement, such as in 1846, when many inquirers (of whom, however, no further record is found) were reported, and in 1848, when two Roman Catholic priests embraced Protestantism—but they were only gleams, and the workers had to content themselves with the consciousness that by Lieder’s revision of the Coptic and the Arabic New Testament * for the 8.P.C.K., and his translation into Arabic of the Homilies of St. Chrysostom, etc., they were accomplishing a linguistic work which would remain, and that through the medium of the schools and the distribution of Scripture portions a considerable knowledge of the Word of God was being imparted. They hoped, too, that the influence of their work was telling far away from Egypt, for a former pupil in one of the C.M.S. day-schools was consecrated Abuna (Archbishop) of the Abyssinian Church in 1841 at the age of twenty-one, and sixteen years later was said still to be maintaining a correspondence with Mr. Lieder.

The Mission abandoned.

So for many years the Mission went on. In 1838 illness compelled Mr. Miiller to retire, and in 1851 Mr. Krusé was assigned to Palestine. Four years later the Rev. 8S. W. Koelle was transferred from Sierra Leone, but after a year or so in Egypt, during which he came to regard it as a ‘country of dead men,’ he was obliged by the state of his health to remove to Palestine, and Mr. Lieder was once more left alone in the Mission. The latter was getting an old man now and was unable to do much. In 1859 the Committee reported that he was unable to pursue active labours, but that they hesitated to place him on the retired list because of his influence over the * The Coptic Patriarch himself undertook to correct the proofs of the Arabic New Testament.