This is a service of unique interest in the history of our city, and of our cathedral. It is one of those occasions which make us realise, amid many differences, the essential fact of our national spiritual unity. All who are loyal, all who are patriotic in Calcutta, are gathered or would have gladly gathered within this cathedral to-night. There is not in all this congregation—there is not, I think, in all Calcutta—a British heart that is not moved with sympathy and admiration for you, my brethren, who are going forth to the war in South Africa. And surely there is not a British heart but feels how just it is, how wise and how truly consonant with the best traditions of our race, that it should be your wish on the eve of your departure to seek the protection of, invite the benediction of, and to consecrate yourselves to the name and service of the Most High God. For if it has been possible at other times and in other places within the last few weeks to strike a note of felicity and festivity—I do not say that they have been unduly prominent, but who has not heard them?—if there has been excitement, merriment, and applause on your behalf, it is a note that I would not sound this evening. You are going, I know, with deep solemnity and resolution, and you are going as men who have undertaken a noble duty from which you might have held aloof without reproach, in the full consciousness of its cost and peril, and in the sure conviction that the part you are playing is not unworthy, as indeed it is not, of the British race and the British Empire. You are proud, then, of your self-chosen mission, but it may well be that someone who looks forward with eager anticipation to the future is yet, in his heart, possessed with the not ignoble anxiety that warfare is no child’s play. It is stern and awful. He who enters upon it with a light heart is no true soldier of God or man. You are assembled now within the sanctuary of religion. In a few hours or days you will set sail for a distant land. It is certain that you all will be exposed to the strain and danger of the battlefield, and it is by no means certain that all will return to their homes in safety. Some who hear me now will probably yield their lives for the Empire. Can I forget how, on the 24th day of last September, I shook hands at the Kidderpore Docks with the gallant officer commanding the Gloucestershire Regiment, and how within a few weeks from that day he had fallen—shot dead at the head of his regiment? As his fate was, so may be yours. That is the nobility and dignity of your service. The people of Calcutta would not throng into this cathedral to pray for you, with you, if it were not impressed upon their minds that you are inspired with the brave ambition that makes great Empires great. When they shall bid you farewell, as the troopship slowly passes into the