_1811, February 26._--Peacefully preaching the Word of life to a people daily edified is the nearest approach to heaven below. But to move from place to place, hurried away without having time to do good, is vexatious to the spirit as well as harassing to the body. Hearing last Saturday that some sons of Belial, members of the Bapre Hunt,[43] intended to have a great race the following day, I informed Mr. Duncan, at whose house I was staying, and recommended the interference of the secular arm. He accordingly sent to forbid it. The messengers of the Bapre Hunt were exceedingly exasperated; some came to church expecting to hear a sermon against hunting, but I merely preached to them on 'the one thing needful.' Finding nothing to lay hold of, they had the race on Monday, and ran _Hypocrite_ against _Martha_ and _Mary_. His last message to India, from the 'faithful saying' of 1 Timothy i. 15, was misunderstood and resented, as his first sermon in Calcutta had been in similar circumstances. _March 24._ (Sunday).--Speaking on the evidence of its truth, I mentioned its constant efficacy in collecting the multitude, and commanding their attention, which moral discourses never did. This was considered as a reflection on the ministers of Bombay, which distressed me not a little. Henry Martyn was granted a passage to Arabia and Persia in the Benares, Captain Sealey, one of the ships of the old Indian Navy, ordered to cruise along with the Prince of Wales in the Persian Gulf. At that time the danger was considerable. For a century the Joasmi Arabs, of 'the pirate coast' of Oman, had been the terror of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, driving off even the early Portuguese, and confining the Persians, then invulnerable by land, to their own shores. The Wahabee puritans of Islam having mastered them, they added to their own bloodthirsty love of plunder and the slave-trade the fanaticism of Mohammed-ibn-Abdul-Wahab, the 'bestower of blessings,' as the name signifies. The East India Company tolerated them, retaining two or three ships of war in the Gulf for the protection of the factories at Gombroon, Bushire, and Busrah. But, in an evil moment, in the year 1797, the Joasmi pirates dared to seize a British vessel. From that hour their fate was sealed, though the process of clearing the southern coast of Asia of pirates and slavers ended only with the accession of Queen Victoria, in the year when Aden was added to the empire. In 1809-10 the Bombay Government expedition, under Commodore John Wainwright, captured their stronghold of Ras-ul-Khymah, delivered our feudatory of Muscat from their terrorism, and gave the Gulf peace for ten years. The two ships of war which conveyed the chaplain missionary with his message of peace to Eastern Arabia and Persia were sent to complete the work of the Wainwright expedition,[44] which had been summoned by Lord Minto to the conquest of Java.