Bishop Gobat's plans to reopen Ethiopia for missionary activity bore fruit when, in the same year as the coronation, Dr Krapf, who had already had experience of the country, returned to resume his work and brought with him a young German called Martin Flad. Theodore and the Ahuna, or Patriarch, gave them permission to undertake missionary activities provided that the missionaries were not ordained priests and that all converts, of whatever origin, were baptised into the Ethiopian Coptic Church. The emperor also insisted that his real need was for artisans who would help to raise the technical standards of his people and it was therefore agreed that any assistants required by the missionaries should be skilled craftsmen who could also preach the gospel. It became a matter of some discord at a later date which of these functions was the more important. The emperor clearly thought his country was in little need of foreign Christian preachers but was sorely lacking in the know-how which would enable him to achieve his ambitions and, especially, to provide him with guns and ammunition.

After three years in the field, Flad returned to Jerusalem to report to Gobat and soon returned to Ethiopia, supported by a young wife who was a qualified pharmacist and armed with thirty-three camel-loads of bibles in Amharic. Flad had given a favourable report to his bishop and indicated that he found a more encouraging response among the Falashas than among the Amharas. This news delighted the C.M.J., whose conversionist activities were gaining much popularity in mid-Victorian England and were attracting support from all classes of society, not least among a god-fearing section of the aristocracy. For thirty-seven years the C.M.J.'s affairs were presided over by that great missionary enthusiast and philanthropist the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, to whose memory, ironically, the pagan statue of Eros was erected in Piccadilly Circus.

When the C.M.J. celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, in 1859, it decided to expand its activities and, according to Payne, in order 'to test whether it was the will of God for them to start a mission

(1) Bates, The Abyssinian Difficulty, p. 18.