Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/380

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DISTINGUISHED CHURCHMEN

ciative of the young Chaplain's influence and accomplishments among the Royal Engineers at Aldershot, with the result that he was ordered to Chatham as senior chaplain in charge of the corps.

But greater things were in store. Four years had barely elapsed ere Mr Edgehill was sent to the important station of Nova Scotia, and he is not likely soon to forget the reception accorded him. Without going out of his way to do it, he happily anticipated the popular tastes of the Church folk. Early celebrations and a surpliced choir were two new features that struck him as imperatively necessary. People with natural inquisitiveness attended his church, desiring to see and know something of “the High Churchman with Broad sympathies.” His preaching did the rest. Those who came to listen, stayed to pray, and, with whetted appetites, indicated their hunger for more by permanently enlarging his congregation, until the capacity of the edifice was no longer sufficient. In time he was a recognised force in the Diocese, so much so that the Bishop assigned to him a seat in the Synod, which gave him a legitimate voice in the counsels of the Church. A writer in Church Bells, in an excellent description of the man and his work, sheds strong light on this and a later period of Mr Edghill's life. “Such was the esteem in which he was held in this Diocese,” says the writer, referring to Nova Scotia, “that on the death of the Bishop,