GREAT CANADIAN PRELATE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9990, 9 March 1910, Page 3

GREAT CANADIAN PRELATE.

The prelate referred to is the late Archbishop of Rupert's Land, Primate of All Canada, Prelate of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. His career is set forth in "'The Life of Robert Machray," by his nephew, Robert Machray, and the nephew, who was at one time Canon of St. John's, Winnipeg, and has since achieved renown was a writer of thrilling romances of mystery and crime, writes with "piety," in the Latin sense, but without any excess either of unction or of panegyric, trying, as he says, "to let the story tell itself." It is a story of a sort for which there will always be a public; the story of a single-hearted divine who, in mundane affairs, was the architect of his own fortunes, and to whom the Church owed much and the State not a little. „A "CALL" TO HUDSON BAY. "Brilliant" is not, perhaps, the epithet which one must select in order to characteriae the Archbishon adequately. Genius, it) his case, was made up of a combination of robust common sense with a power of taking infinite pains, in oegging away in the face of all discouragements. Aberdeen was his first University. He began by twice failing to obtain a small bursary in an open competition; he ended by graduating as the best man of his year, specialty distinguished in mathematics. There was character in the youth who did that; and the confidence his character inspired is attested by the proposals immediately made to him. He was offered the headmaatership of a seminary in the South of England, and he was also offered a loan from a local bank, guaranteed by Aberdeen professors, if he liked to go on to Cambridge. He did go on to Cambridge, entering his name at Sidney Sussex College—trie college of Oliver Cromwell and Fuller, the]biographer of worthies. His personality was valued there, in spite of the fact that his poverty prevented him, not only from engaging in athletic sports. but from subscribing to Athletic cluba. He won a scholarship, became a wrangler, was elected a Fellow of the College, and became its dean —the functionary, that is to say, charged with the maintenance of its discipline. He took orders and held small cures of souls in conjunction with bis tutorial work; but his secession from the Scotch to the English kind of Christianity involved in spiritual crisis. He merely felt that the machinery of the Church of England afforded better opportunities for doing good. And then, a few years later, came the call to "oversee" the work of the Church in the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. THE SEE OF RUPERT'S LAND. The apostolic statement that he who desires a bishopric desires a good thin? was hardly true of the see of Rupert's Land in those days in any but spiritual penst. The mere difficulty of getting to the see, now reached so easily in the express trains of the Canadian Pacific railway would have been enough to deter any man not of an adventurous temperament. No less than 400 milcs_of prairie had to be traversed by stage or carriage or waggon. Nor was the centre of the future cathedral city - much of a place to look at when ultimately reached : "The inhabitants of the Red River Settlement, (Mr Machray writes) lived in a very primitive, in almost a patriarchal fashion. Most of the .heads of families bad a long narrow strip of land fronting on one of the two rivers; a few of the houses were of stone, all the rest were of woodgenerally roughly-squared logs of oak or elm, with the .interstices in the walls filled in with mud and lime. They cultivated no more of their land • than was sufficient for their subsistence; they had flocks and herds of no i great size; the inaccessibility of , their country, and' the absence of markets--the nearest in those days! was hundreds of miles away from i Fort Garry-deprived them of all in- i ducetnent to attempt more than was absolutely necessary to support life in some sort of rude comfort." | And the Bishop presently to to be Archbishop grew up with the country, and saw this rude settlement become a huge city, the capital of the Middle West, lighted by electricity, equipped with telephones and tramcars and all the appliances of our modern civilisation/ THE LOUIS KIEL REBELLION. The life which witnessed that transformation was in itself a romance; but the Bishop did a good deal more

than witness it, Ha was himself a part—a very important part—of what he saw. There was even a moment when it may fairly be claimed that he was the most important part of it- when it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his sagacity saved this province of Canada for the Empire. That was at the time of the Louis Riel rebellion. The danger was that the loyalist party would take precipitate action with insufficient strength. The consequence of their doing so would infallibly have been a massacre of Louis Riel's prisoners in Fort Garry, with other massacres to follow, and then, in all probability, an occupation of the disturbed territory in the interests of order by the armed force 3of the United States. The Bishop realised that, and Induced the loyalist leaders to adopt the policy of Fabius Cuntator. that great man who, as the Roman poet puts it, cuuctar.do restituit rem. But he also realised that it was essential that the Home Government should be kept accurately informed of what was going on. and as there was a risk of his letters being intercepted, inspected, and perhaps destroyed by the rebels, he employed an ingenious subterfuge. Instead of writing direct to the Colonial Office, he wrote to a Cambridge friend, employing a cipher based on the Latin grace used at his old college; and the Cambridge friend decoded the communications and sent them on to Lord Granville. The full story of the stirring events is well told by Mr Machray in a work of far more "actual" interest than the average ecclesiastical biography.