ABSTRACT
After George Alfred Lefroy’s death in Calcutta on New Year’s Day in 1919, the obituaries and memorial sermons spoke of him as an influential man. It might be said that his entire life had been intended to produce that description, for the idea of influence dominated to an extraordinary degree the rhetoric of Lefroy and of the movements and institutions that he represented. The Delhi Mission News described him as “one of those Christian lads from our great English public schools of whom Archbishop Benson once said: ‘The army of heaven which follows the Son of Man on white horses has no more fair, more beautiful recruits.’”1 After leaving Cambridge for Delhi in 1879, he ascended the ecclesiastical hierarchy in India, from Head of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, to Bishop of Lahore, finally becoming Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India, first among equals of the Bishops of the Anglican Ecclesiastical Establishment.
