Missionary Career
On 16 April 1850 he joined the missionary service of Church Missionary Society, and was sent to Agra, India. He set sail to India on East Indian Queen on 11 September 1850 and reached Calcutta on 2 January 1851.
Soon he headed off to Agra, where he was appointed for educational work. He founded the St. John's College at Agra, which formally opened in 1853, though he had started taking classes in small room with ten boys, while the college building was being built. The college was named as St. John's, after the college of another noted missionary, Henry Martyn (1781–1812) at Cambridge. He also learnt seven languages, including Hindustani, Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic to properly administrate the school, as he also became school's first principal, and a post he held till the end of his seven-year stay at Agra.
Later he married, Miss M. A. Janson, whom he had met at Oxford, and one of his eight children, Ellen Penelope French (1854–1892), went on to marry, Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, fourth Bishop of Manchester, (1903–1921).
1861 saw him, moving to Derajat in central Pakistan, where he started a new Mission, and a first in the area, though bad health forced him to leave for England, by end of 1862, where he reached, on 7 February 1863.
In 1877, on St. Thomas' Day at Westminster Abbey, London, he was appointed the first Anglican Bishop of a large new diocese of Lahore, which included, all of the Punjab and northwestern India, and remained so until 1887, during the time he founded the Lahore Divinity College, which opened on 21 November 1870 and also remained its Principal for many years, he supervised the translation of the Bible and Prayer Book into Hindustani and Pashto, and also made visits to Kashmir and Iran (1883), where he was the first Episcopal bishop to visit the country, before returning to England, due to bad health in 1887.
He reached Muscat, on his final missionary work, on 8 February 1891 and became the first missionary to visit the region; he had just started setting up his work there, when his health started failing, and having been cared for by Portuguese Catholics he died on 14 May 1891 in Muscat, Oman and was buried in a Christian cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Valpy French
Famous quotes containing the words missionary and/or career:
“The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us.... Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.”
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)