His visit to England was specially gratifying to Ziegenbalg. He was personally for the first time to meet all those good friends of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge who had so liberally supplied him with money, books and letters full of encouragement. At a meeting of the Society he was welcomed with an eloquent Latin address, to which he replied in Tamil. Before his return the aged missionary was presented to King George I, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and other eminent persons, and afterwards in 1717 the King wrote him a letter in Latin in which he said: “We pray you may be endued with health and strength of body, that you may long continue to fulfil your ministry with good success, of which we shall be rejoiced to hear, so you will always find us ready to succour you in whatever may tend to promote your work and to excite your zeal.” Two years afterwards when Archbishop Wake was acting as President of the Society he sent to Ziegenbalg and his colleague Gründler a Latin letter full of good wishes. The following extract will show the spirit of this Apostolic epistle:-- “Your praise it will be (a praise of endless duration on earth and followed by a just recompense in Heaven) to have laboured in the vineyard which yourselves have planted, to have declared the Name of Christ where it was not known before and through much peril and difficulty to have converted to the faith those among whom you afterwards fulfilled your ministry. Your province therefore, brethren, your office, I place before all dignities in the Church. Let others be pontiffs, patriarchs, or popes, let them glitter in purple, in scarlet or in gold, let them seek the admiration of the wondering multitude and receive obeisance on the bended knee. You have acquired a better name than they and a more sacred fame. Admitted into the glorious society of the prophets, evangelists and apostles, ye with them shall shine like the sun among his lesser stars in the Kingdom of your Father, for ever.”