India
By the time Wilson was 54 then he had lived a full and useful life as an Anglican churchman and a doughty supporter of the evangelical movement in England. On this basis alone he may have merited our attention. However, in 1832 he became the fifth Anglican Bishop of Calcutta (then a vast diocese reaching as far as Australia). There in Calcutta, with only one break to return to England, in 1845-6, when recovering from illness, he went on to serve the Lord for another 25 years. It was during this visit home that he made a severe attack on the policies of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in India and received an unprecedented invitation to preach a second anniversary sermon for the CMS.
Wilson had always shown an interest in missionary work and references to this can be found as far back as his conversion. In 1829 John Turner, consecrated Bishop of Calcutta in 1829, visited Islington before leaving England and there considered the needs of the diocese with Wilson. When Turner died in 1831, the third bishop to do so in five years, Wilson, while sharing the general anxiety about the succession, was not an obvious candidate. However, when several others refused the offer and Wilson, in some desperation, indicated his willingness to be considered, the influence of evangelical friends, including Lord Glenelg, secured his appointment. He therefore resigned his post at Islington, received his DD by diploma, and was consecrated at Lambeth Palace in April, 1832.
In the manner of the day his eldest son, Daniel (b 1805), who had been appointed to Worton in 1828, succeeded him at Islington, and his nephew Josiah Bateman (subsequently his son-in-law and biographer), went with him to India as his chaplain. They left Portsmouth June 19, 1832 and arrived in Calcutta on November 5.
Wilson's predecessors had made only limited headway in establishing the extent of episcopal authority, defining the nature of the ecclesiastical establishment and standardising liturgical practice. Bishop Wilson's years in India were to be devoted to these fundamental tasks. He re-established the physical and social presence of the bishop in Calcutta, brought order to episcopal administration and revived or set in motion many of the activities familiar to him from his London parishes - clerical meetings, lecture series, infant schools, writing for the Christian Intelligencer and church building. Between 1839 and 1847 he masterminded construction of Calcutta's cathedral.
To make his leadership felt outside Calcutta he exploited the practice of episcopal visitation to the full. In five major journeys between 1834 and 1857, each lasting between two and three years, his episcopal cavalcade, often with more than 250 soldiers, elephant attendants, bearers and camp-followers, traversed the huge diocese from Simla to Colombo and from Delhi and Bombay to Singapore.
His task was slightly eased by the erection of new dioceses for Madras (1835), Bombay (1837), New South Wales (1836) and Colombo (1845) and his own appointment as metropolitan.
With his forceful personality and struggling, in his own words, to maintain ‘firm churchmanship … in the face of high-church principles and no-church principles’, Wilson often appeared to others as the embodiment of episcopal pretension. His contempt for Tractarianism, ‘this egregious drivelling fatuity’ and his sustained attacks on it, notably in his second charge in 1838 and subsequent sermons, did not save him from perhaps the greatest irony of his career - serious conflict with the CMS and its lay supporters in India over the licensing and superintendence of missionaries. To one who had done so much for the cause of missions at home, the suspicion with which missionaries on the ground viewed his plans to make Bishop's College the great training centre for ministers in India, their frequent neglect of ecclesiastical order partly under the influence of the society's Lutheran employees and, above all in southern India, compromises with caste, came as a great disappointment.
Wilson tackled these issues with characteristic vigour and displayed sufficient flexibility to reach generally acceptable agreements with both the CMS and the civil authorities on many church–state questions. He called the Indian caste system a 'cancer' and in his famous essay, On the Distinction of Castes in India (1834), he abandoned Reginald Heber's temporising for the demand that in the church it ‘must be abandoned, decidedly, immediately, finally’. Reinforcing the requirement with personal visitations, Wilson carried the missionaries with him but lost the allegiance of many local church members.
Loane sums up this final period as proving him to be a great man and a first-class bishop, a time when he did a noble work for India.
By the time Wilson was 54 then he had lived a full and useful life as an Anglican churchman and a doughty supporter of the evangelical movement in England. On this basis alone he may have merited our attention. However, in 1832 he became the fifth Anglican Bishop of Calcutta (then a vast diocese reaching as far as Australia). There in Calcutta, with only one break to return to England, in 1845-6, when recovering from illness, he went on to serve the Lord for another 25 years. It was during this visit home that he made a severe attack on the policies of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in India and received an unprecedented invitation to preach a second anniversary sermon for the CMS.
Wilson had always shown an interest in missionary work and references to this can be found as far back as his conversion. In 1829 John Turner, consecrated Bishop of Calcutta in 1829, visited Islington before leaving England and there considered the needs of the diocese with Wilson. When Turner died in 1831, the third bishop to do so in five years, Wilson, while sharing the general anxiety about the succession, was not an obvious candidate. However, when several others refused the offer and Wilson, in some desperation, indicated his willingness to be considered, the influence of evangelical friends, including Lord Glenelg, secured his appointment. He therefore resigned his post at Islington, received his DD by diploma, and was consecrated at Lambeth Palace in April, 1832.
In the manner of the day his eldest son, Daniel (b 1805), who had been appointed to Worton in 1828, succeeded him at Islington, and his nephew Josiah Bateman (subsequently his son-in-law and biographer), went with him to India as his chaplain. They left Portsmouth June 19, 1832 and arrived in Calcutta on November 5.
Wilson's predecessors had made only limited headway in establishing the extent of episcopal authority, defining the nature of the ecclesiastical establishment and standardising liturgical practice. Bishop Wilson's years in India were to be devoted to these fundamental tasks. He re-established the physical and social presence of the bishop in Calcutta, brought order to episcopal administration and revived or set in motion many of the activities familiar to him from his London parishes - clerical meetings, lecture series, infant schools, writing for the Christian Intelligencer and church building. Between 1839 and 1847 he masterminded construction of Calcutta's cathedral.
To make his leadership felt outside Calcutta he exploited the practice of episcopal visitation to the full. In five major journeys between 1834 and 1857, each lasting between two and three years, his episcopal cavalcade, often with more than 250 soldiers, elephant attendants, bearers and camp-followers, traversed the huge diocese from Simla to Colombo and from Delhi and Bombay to Singapore.
His task was slightly eased by the erection of new dioceses for Madras (1835), Bombay (1837), New South Wales (1836) and Colombo (1845) and his own appointment as metropolitan.
With his forceful personality and struggling, in his own words, to maintain ‘firm churchmanship … in the face of high-church principles and no-church principles’, Wilson often appeared to others as the embodiment of episcopal pretension. His contempt for Tractarianism, ‘this egregious drivelling fatuity’ and his sustained attacks on it, notably in his second charge in 1838 and subsequent sermons, did not save him from perhaps the greatest irony of his career - serious conflict with the CMS and its lay supporters in India over the licensing and superintendence of missionaries. To one who had done so much for the cause of missions at home, the suspicion with which missionaries on the ground viewed his plans to make Bishop's College the great training centre for ministers in India, their frequent neglect of ecclesiastical order partly under the influence of the society's Lutheran employees and, above all in southern India, compromises with caste, came as a great disappointment.
Wilson tackled these issues with characteristic vigour and displayed sufficient flexibility to reach generally acceptable agreements with both the CMS and the civil authorities on many church–state questions. He called the Indian caste system a 'cancer' and in his famous essay, On the Distinction of Castes in India (1834), he abandoned Reginald Heber's temporising for the demand that in the church it ‘must be abandoned, decidedly, immediately, finally’. Reinforcing the requirement with personal visitations, Wilson carried the missionaries with him but lost the allegiance of many local church members.
Loane sums up this final period as proving him to be a great man and a first-class bishop, a time when he did a noble work for India.
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