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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 68

George Augustus Selwyn

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George Augustus Selwyn.

Tucker's "Life of Selwyn"—in two octavo volumes—is a pure compilation from the Bishop's own letters, journals, and correspondence. It lets the man speak for himself, and takes the testimony of his intimate friends and colleagues by way of mirroring forth his real character. He was born at Hampstead in 1809. He was educated at Eton, and was a graduate of Cambridge, his special college being St. John's. He was consecrated Bishop of New Zealand in 1841. He sailed from England on December 26, 1841, in the Tomatin. Tucker justly says : "Surely no ship since that which carried St. Paul has ever gone to sea with a holier or more precious freight." His party numbered Mr. Cotton, a student of Christchurch; Mr. Whytehead, fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge; Messrs. Cole, Dudley and Reay, missionary clergy; three catechists—Messrs. Butt, Evans, and Nihill; and a schoolmaster and schoolmistress, and his two chaplains. Rupai, a Maori lad returning to New Zealand, was on board. Selwyn learned his language on the voyage. Cotton and Reay made a concordance of the native Testament, and the Bishop made a comparative grammar of Raratonga, Tahitian, and New Zealand translations of the New Testament. On May 19, 1842, the Bishop landed at Auckland. Characteristically enough, he preached, on May 31, a sermon in the Maori tongue. His first visitation of his diocese "extended over 6 months, in which 2,277 miles were traversed, 762 on foot, 86 on horse-tack, 249 in canoes or boats, and 1,180 by ship."

In 1843 he started a college at Waimate. It was literary, religious, and industrial. His own stipend was £1,200. But in 1852, when the Colony received an independent legislature, the Crown ceased to pay its moiety, His spirit was sorely exercised in 1843, on the occasion of the outbreak at the Wairau. When he landed in the Colony there were about 100,000 natives. He laboured zealously to Christianise and civilise them.

In 1844 he married 25 couples in Foveaux Straits, and baptised their 61 tchildren. "The fathers and mothers had been living together for some years" before his visit.

After returning from his tour of the Middle Island and Stewart's Island, where he baptised 71 children, in places hitherto unvisited by a clergyman, he writes, in April, 1844, to the Countess of Powis :—"Have now a bird's-eye view in my mind of my whole diocese, and a beautiful mental map it is, it looked upon, as it may be, at the distance of fifty years; peopled with an orderly and Godly race of settlers, residing in the hundreds and thousands of fertile valleys watered by the clear and sparkling streams, which flow from the fine wooded hills with which the neighbourhood of the coast is bounded." Heke's insurrection at the Bay of Islands was a sore blow the Bishop. But according to the noble philanthropist, "there is something in the native character which disarms personal fears in those who live among them, and are acquainted with their manners. All suspicion of treachery seems to be at variance with the openness and publicity of all their proceed- page 4 ings. Heke published beforehand his determination to attack Kororareka the day on which it was to be made, and even the particulars of his plan for the assault. He, being a just man, was, of course, exposed alike the suspicion of the natives, and to the animosity of the colonists. In 1845, Bishop Selwyn "sought to allay the heat of the blood, and to arrest the fury of the fight; he was also seen bearing the wounded from the field; afterwards unwearied at the bedside of the dying; he was the nurse, surgeon and servant of the sick, as well as their spiritual attendant." The great Bishop, in the midst of turmoil and mutual animosities, is full of sympathy for the English Church : "When I look upon the immense dormant powers of our Church, which for secular reasons are inoperative, its convocations, its synod of bishops, its cathedral system, its diocese organisation, all of which powers are at real work in the Church of Rome, and might be brought into use with us, I cannot doubt that it is our duty to develope all the energies of our own Church before we pronounce upon her insufficiency. My desire, is, in this country, to try what the actual system of the Church of England can do, when disencumbered of its load of seats in Parliament, Erastian compromises, corruption of patronage, confusion of orders, synodless bishops, and an unorganised clergy." When he became Bishop of Lichfield he actually showed how practicable all this was, for he infused life and soul into its dead organism. He did on a large scale what he accomplished on a small scale in New Zealand. "To move my diocese in any perceptible degree I must multiply my own single force through a multitude of wheels and powers; alone, I am powerless. Before me lies an inert mass, which I am utterly unable to heave, and there is no engine ready by which I can supply the defects of my own weakness."

He himself created a system, which became subsequently a model for English dioceses.

In 1846 he transplanted his college from Waimate to Auckland. By the generosity of his English admirers, "a happy party of all ranks-Bishop, Arch-deacon, priests, students and boys" was housed in elegance and comfort. Gradually an "hospital, native schools, servants' houses, and a temporary chapel" were erected. He hunted all over New Zealand and the Melanesian Isles for "hopeful plants" to stock his educational nursery. One hundred and thirty souls—English and aboriginal—"laboured at the cultivation of the college estate, and no task was considered menial." The natives were also taught "to spin and to knit" by means of machinery, so that the Bishop was the pioneer promoter of woollen factories in New Zealand.

In his voyages to Wellington, Otaki, Nelson, Akaroa, Otakoa, the Chatham Islands, and Foveaux Straits, the Bishop enjoyed "the charms of New Zealand air and scenery," and his faculties were quickened by "the well-known effect of salt water."

The Bishop frequently came across a "number of young men of good family and education who had been thrown away "in New Zealand. He had, however, no sympathy with "the demon of whist and science—that false science which was the bane of Cambridge, where second-rate men spent all their time in hearing or telling some new discovery, while the true knowledge of the real interests of mankind were little regarded."

Bishop Selwyn himself always acted upon Christ's example-"Who gave much and received nothing in return." This motive urged him "to pace over thousands of miles of woods, mountains, and swamp," in his great labours of faith, hope and charity. He was a doer, not a mere talker. "We have been cursed by a more than usual share of speculative talk ending in nothing; more philanthropy has been written about New Zealand and less practised than about any other country in the world. If people will now talk less and do more, we may still have the happiness of adding another noble people to the family of civilised men." In his case Bede's page 5 definition of the Episcopate was realised—it was a title, not of honour, but of work. His charges to his Synods breathed learning, sound doctrine and common sense. New Zealand he regarded as a central missionary point, whence he could evangelise the Pacific isles. Here is a pill for our godless professors. "A college without a daily service is like a body without breath or circulation of blood." His great aim, in all his voyages, was "to bring back some promising boys to associate with his native scholars, as a beginning of the Polynesian branch of St. John's College." He greatly loathed the "floating body of rogues and vagabonds who wander from island to island successively, as British justice overtakes one place after another; setting up their grog-shops just outside the pale of civilisation, and there poisoning the work of the missionary and breaking his heart. Such was Kororareka before the country was colonised."

In 1848, "from Kaitaia at the North, to Stewart's Island at the South, over the length of a thousand miles, there was not a village in which the Scriptures were unknown. Out of a native population of 100,000, more than one-half had embraced Christianity."

Peace being secured in New Zealand, after "the fatal affray at the Wairau, the burning of Kororareka and the subsequent wars at the Wairate, at Wanganui and at Porirua," the Bishop made his first voyage to score of the Polynesian isles, for the purpose of "acquiring some practical Knowledge of the vast and almost unexplored field of Melanesia." The result of his voyage of observation was the practical knowledge that "the infamous conduct of unprincipled English traders was sowing those seeds of ill-will and of righteous retaliation, the full harvest of which was reaped in 1870, when Bishop Patteson was massacred at Nukapau." The aboriginals of New Zealand felt that they had been "treated like pigs and slaves."

By the counsels of the missionaries peace had been preserved for a long time. In 1848, in his twenty-ton boat, Bishop Selwyn visited Otago to [unclear: nsel] and help the first settlers. On this occasion the Bishop addressed "the tribe that had assembled to receive," from the Government agent, the sum of £2000, the purchase money of the Middle Island lands not yet alienated. "They had given plains, mountains, rivers, etc., trusting to the good faith of the Government to make suitable reserves for their use." Thus it appears "that lands which would have cost millions to take and beep by force, are quietly ceded for less than a farthing an acre. "

On July 4 the Bishop returned to Auckland, "after a voyage of 14 veeks, having sailed 3000 miles and visited 13 places." He was, indeed, a Cerberus in the Colony, and would not "resign" the New Zealanders to the tender mercies of men who avow the right to take their land, and who could not scruple to use force for that purpose." Avarice prompted this afterwards.

Hence, all over the Pacific Isles, "the most frightful crimes of rapine and massacre are now being committed by the people who received Captain Cook, 70 years ago, with a friendly disposition. The change must be attributed to the fact that we have followed up our first knowledge of New Caledonia, with the most sordid and unscrupulous schemes of avarice, instead of sending out men with the heart of Cook, and with the powers and graces of the ministerial calling." The good Bishop, therefore, "searched at the choicest youths among all the islands, and brought them into his College; and with this centre once formed, the work of grace began to [unclear: gread] to all the regions beyond." The Bishop, in 1849, established Trinity College, at Porirua, for the education of the natives of New Zealand, and Melanesia. He always condemned the greed of land, and for the first ten years he was very unpopular in Wellington. His was "a work of [unclear: unweary-] patience," but he had "courage of the highest type" to sustain him in [unclear: image not readable] work of faith and labour of love. Believing that "New Zealand would [unclear: ecome] the Britain of the Southern Hemisphere," he desired to make his page 6 diocese "the first missionary centre of the Southern Ocean." He was an adept in mastering quickly "the elements of a new language sufficiently to enter at once into communications with the native people, and thus to secure a further progress every day by the removal of the first difficulty." His two colleges he regarded "as the central reservoirs into which all his phials could be poured from the wells and springs of many nations." The confusion of the tongues was very great. "In islands not larger than the Isle of Wight we find dialects so distinct that the inhabitants of the various districts hold no communication with one another." He characteristically asks: "What would you think of an Eton of the Antipodes, in which a different language was spoken at every master's house?" He adds the wise reflection: "No one can go through these seas without finding with humiliation how the martyrs of the Cross fall short, both in number and in energy, of the martyrs of the world." He brought from those emerald isles wild little boys to be educated at the colleges and to be "the forerunners of the indigenous clergy of Melanesia." Williams, he believed, "was sacrificed to an indiscriminate thirst for vengeance provoked by wanton and barbarous aggression" on the part of certain white "miscreants who have disgraced their country and belied their religion by their evil deeds among these islands." He believed in the general honesty of the unsophisticated natives; for, "it is impossible to believe that men who trust themselves so confidingly with strangers are in their own nature treacherous and cruel." His matured plan for the conversion of the Melanesian tribes was "to select a few promising youths from all the islands, to prove and test them first by observation of their habits on board a floating school, then to take them for further training to New Zealand; and, lastly, when they are sufficiently advanced, to send them back as teachers to their own people, if possible, with some English missionary, to give effect and regularity to their work."

The Bishop's thoughts "revolved in an orbit from New Guinea to the Auckland Islands." The Bishop was not only a practical man, but was also a good scholar. He prepared an analysis of the Bible as "a royal road to learning it" by his boys. "It was found that all the words in the Bible could be classified under about 250 heads, and under these, by following the root of thought rather than the root of language, the delicate lights and shades of each idiomatic expression were fought out."

Writing in 1850 to a friend at Eton, the Bishop urges upon him to "dedicate his very best boy to the mission work. Lead him steadily to look upon a wild hill in New Caledonia as a more noble post than a fellowship at Eton, or even the provostship of King's." New Caledonia he describes as a "lovely country. Such waterfalls! Such rocky piles and minarets of dark grey stone! Such a river as I have rowed into this afternoon, with tufted groves of cocoanuts sheltering the neatest beehive houses, and hanging gardens of yams and taro on the heights, and dingles of dark wood, which tell where the hidden water-course has fed the trees during the scorching heat and bright green mountains towering over all, and running up into the deep blue sky, as if to teach us how prodigal nature is of her charms to waste them thus upon eyes which cannot discern beauty and hearts which cannot admire it. But believe me that it is not true that only man is vile. This race a men are not vile, but, as Cook found them, the most friendly people in the world." On board his 20 ton boat he had "the representatives of ten different languages in dialects." Bishop Selwyn had "a singleness of purpose, the entire devotion of himself, and all he is, and all he was—the entail renunciation of self and all belonging to him in comparison with the duty and the object of the present moment." He believed that "the chief and most influential means for the accomplishment of his object, is the education of youths from these islands at the College, and not the planting of mission stations in the islands themselves. The great variety of languages amongst page 7 them is a bar to this, and points rather to the need of gathering them together from all parts and teaching them English, and so making our tongue the missionary language, as the Roman was in former days." He had fifty boys of first-rate natural parts in his College of St. John. They were taught to work at different trades, as well as to read, write, cipher, and sing, etc. He had 1000 acres of land at St. John's College, and buildings worth £5000. His Colonial and English friends supplied the funds. "The scholarships at St. John's College are now—1850—ten in number, endowed with sums of from £500 to £700 each." When he took his boys back to their parents, he felt, from their joy and greeting, that he "was free of the islands, and could walk where he pleased."

On April 15, 1851, he wrote to Lady Powis :—"I am just returning from a voyage of 4000 miles to Stewart's Island, Otakou, Canterbury, Chatham Islands, Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth, and am now Within 100 miles of home, after an absence of four months." The Sydney people gave him a longer boat than the Undine, "which has now carried me 24,000 miles, a space equal to the circumference of the whole globe."

Bishop Selwyn, like all great men, was a good physiognomist. "His quick-sighted reading of countenance and apprehension of gestures; his habits of order and forethought, besides his calmness and courage, contributed to his safety, and enabled him to walk unscathed where others would be in danger."

In the Border Maid, which cost £1200, he, during his first voyage of three months, brought back 13 scholars from 6 different isles, and speaking [unclear: image not readable] different tongues. He had spread the Gospel "over a range of 4000 miles, to islands of which even the names are almost unknown in London." He had six youths at his college from the Chatham Islands—"the actual antipodes of Greenwich." His diocese extended from "the Auckland Islands to the Carolines—i.e., from 50 south latitude to 34 north latitude, upwards of 80 degrees of latitude by 20 of longitude." In short, he surveyed "the progress of religion in the coasts and islands of the Pacific."

In 1851, in the tenth year of his episcopate, he held a confirmation in the college chapel. The candidates, "clothed in white robes, represented people speaking ten languages, gathered from one-fifth part of the earth's circumference from east to west, and one-tenth part from north to south." He had established St. Stephen's school for native girls." There suitable wives were trained for his native teachers. It was grand and thankworthy to walk through the fields which he had sown, amid trees which he had planted, towards a church which he had built, and filled with scholars whom he had reared, whose mouths he had fed, whose bodies he had clothed, whose minds he had taught, that they might do the same for others after them, by the labour of his own head and hands, and through a vast amount of opposition and lack of sympathy."

In 1847-8 a body of military settlers arrived in the Colony, and "increased the college work greatly. The Government imported several bodies of pensioners, with their families, from England, and planted them in 4 vilages, within 6 to 8 miles of St. John's College, without making provision in the way of chaplains, or a salary for such. The Bishop, at his own expense, erected little churches at Panmure, Otahuhu, and Onehunga, all at distances from the college varying from 3 to 6 miles. He and his young clergy ministered to the spiritual wants of these pensioners. In 1850 he was recruited in his college work by the arrival of Messrs. Lloyd and Abraham. In 1853 the native industrial school ceased; for "industrial schools on the same principles were now at work in several parts of the islands, where boys could be fed and taught at half the expense." So that Bishop Selwyn was the real founder of industrial schools.

In 1852 Bishop Selwyn saw that "the careful superintendence of this multitude of islands will require the services of a missionary bishop, able page 8 and willing to devote himself to this work." After his return voyage, 25 youths and 2 young women—"the representatives of almost as many languages"—were added to his college. "The Bishop seemed to realise the true conception of the great Apostle of the Gentiles." These Polynesians had, indeed, their minds often dim and unused to exertion, but with every perceptive sense and faculty quickened to a degree of which we have no conception—the eye accustomed to track the step of every living creature, the flight of every bird in the air, the gliding of the many-coloured fish within their coral caves; the car, awake in the dead of night to the slightest sound which might warn them of the approach of an enemy." In 1852, he writes: "One whole year I have spent at sea between the English settlements, distant 1000 miles at their extreme points, and requiring a voyage of 2,500 or 3000 miles to visit them all. In that time my charge, journals, study of languages, navigation, and the chief part of my correspondence have been accomplished." The Bishop was a philosopher, for, writing to his son at Eton, he said, inter alia : "We can form some faint idea of spiritual agencies by comparing them with the discoveries of science, and then observing how far the most wonderful law of matter falls short of the simplest exercise of mind. The thoughts of time and distance are closely connected: the caravan in the desert measures its journeys by days and hours, according to the steady pace of the camel or ass; the earth's surface is measured in longtitude, either by degrees or hours, but the electric telegraph changes the usual course of our thoughts and daily experience by disconnecting distance from time. Still we have the wires to stand in the way of the pure conception of a spiritual agency, independent alike of distance and of time. The polar system carries us a step nearer, where we become acquainted with a force by which all the planets are bound to the sun, and one to another. The amount of this force can be calculated with the strictest accuracy, but the nature of the force itself is beyond our comprehension. We simply give the name of gravitation to a power which we cannot explain, and which is so entirely independent of matter as to act equally through a vacuum. But we are conscious of a power within ourselves far more wonderful and inexplicable than any of the forces by which the universe is governed, because they are all reducible to some fixed and, for the most part, uniform law; but the power of thought within us, with all the rapidity of light and of electricity, and with the same power of passing, like gravitation, from earth to heaven, has an infinite versatility, which defies all calculation." The Apostle-Bishop spent a great part of his life "riding over the waves," sometimes "in a boisterous gale," in order to waft the Gospel news from isle to isle. In 1853 he was able to write: "The dim and visionary idea of New Zealand, which I used to brood over in 1841, before we left England, is changed by God's blessing to an accurate knowledge of every accessible part of the coast, and of almost every inhabited place in the interior." He had made seven voyages among the Pacific Isles, visiting more than 50 isles in perfect security, having disarmed the suspicions of the natives, which had been raised by the rapacity of so-called Christian adventurers, and had 25 scholars entrusted to him in 1852, so that they might pass a season under his hospitable roof. In 1854 he sailed for England. He declared at the Mansion House that "if the Church of England had £500,000 a year to spend in missions she could not do better with half of that sum than spend it on 500 Bishops with £500 a year each." Out of his own salary of £1,200 a year he only drew £500, and he devoted the £600 per annum, which the Church Missionary Society gave him, for the support of new sees." In 1854 he secured the services of Bishop Patteson to be Bishop of Melanesia, and raised an endowment fund of £10,000 for the new see. In the cause of missions he delivered four sermons before the Cambridge University. The Bishop of "the unnumbered isles of the Pacific" sent a thrill of enthusiasm all over England. In August, 1855, the Bishop boldly rebuked the murderer Katatore, and told him to his face page 9 that he "killed an unarmed man in cold blood for the matter of land. You repeated the act of Cain towards Abel, and in the sight of God and man you are a murderer." It was Selwyn's constant practice to "boldly rebuke vice, constantly speak the truth, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake." As a matter of course he was frequently "at varience with the civil authorities, and was bitterly misrepresented by the Press." During the first quarter of 1856 "he had walked 550 miles and ridden 450, having examined and confirmed 1,500 people."

His college was emphatically the seed-plot of the ministry. He was this year sailing in his new yacht, the Southern Cross, over the Pacific Ocean, and he visited Norfolk Island, which he thought a fine centre for his Melanesian scholars. He visited the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia groups, 50 in number.

Norfolk Island he contemplated to make the head-quarters of the Bishop of Melanesia. Speaking of the Pitcairners—whose friends objected to the introduction of the coloured race amongst them—the Bishop justly writes : "What the community will want is a high and practical tone of feeling and sense of duty; something to energise a nature which partakes largely of tropical inertness; some higher stimulus than the wool, beef, and arrow-root with which their thoughts will be speedily absorbed." During this voyage be landed on 60 islands and brought 33 scholars to New Zealand. He administered the Communion to 85 persons on Norfolk Island, including a Septuagenarian woman, a daughter of John Adams, the last survivor of the mutineers of the Bounty. On Christmas Day, 1856, Dr. Harper was installed into the Bishopric of Christchurch.

Along with Patteson, in 1857, he visited 52 islands in the Pacific. Patteson had a special aptitude for learning the different languages of the isles. He gloried at the idea of the establishment of bishoprics in New Zealand, so as to leave him more time for missionary work. The vision of the bishopric of Norfolk Island, with "its train of 100 islands," rose before his fervid imagination. The Southern Cross was slightly "damaged by six hours' bumping on a reef in New Caledonia." The Bishop dived beneath her and "felt over the whole of the keel and forward part of the vessel, and ascertained the exact condition of her bottom, and the nature of the injuries sustained." He left New Caledonia with a salute of 11 guns from the French officers. This was in 1858 : "A year of blessings—two prosperous voyages to the islands; one prosperous voyage to the southern settlement; one-third of the visitation tour by land accomplished; the consecration of the Bishops of Wellington and Nelson." In 1859, first General Synod was held, and Archdeacon Williams was consecrated Bishop of Waiapu. This year he took his farewell of the Melanesian Islands, accompanied by Bishop Patteson. The Rev. S. Blackburn, the head master of St. John's College, justly said : "Bishop Selwyn I always regard as the greatest man this age has produced. A king, every inch of him; he would rule by a look, but stoop to perform the most menial office without the slightest loss of dignity." He had great energy, "a love of work, and great power of endurance. I have heard of his taking eight services in one day," when there were 10,000 soldiers in the North Island, and no chaplains. He was a great favourite with the soldiers. They admired him as a man, a bishop, and a potential soldier. He would have made a grand general. His seaman-like qualities were equally admired by the naval men. They thought he would have been a first-class admiral. He had a marvellous "acquaintance with Holy Scripture." He was a sort of universal genius. The trials of colonial bishops—according to the testimony of his own fellow-labourers—"do not so much consist in the pleasant excitement of walking through the glorious forests, and swimming the rivers of New Zealand, nor in the novelty and refreshment of missionary work among a simple or savage people, but in being brought into contact day by day with the rudest and coarsest spirits of unrestrained page 10 colonialism, which vaunts itself and prides itself most especially in saying and doing the most offensive things in the most offensive way." The Bishop's address, at the opening of the triennial General Synod of New Zealand, delivered on March 9, 1859, was certainly a most masterly production. He then and there handed over Crown grants of 14,000 acres of land for the support of religion and education. He told the Synod that its "field of view extended over 80 islands; and our work will not be done till twice that number of heathen islands shall have received the message of salvation. The Synod consecrated the Bishop of Waiapu—"four Eton bishops lighting a fifth candlestick to be a light to lighten our native Christians." The organisation of the Church was approaching to a state of comparative perfection. "The end and aim of this spiritual organisation is work, greater, better, more effectual work. Every object in the world around us suggests the thought that single-handed work has passed away, as belonging to an age of barbarism. The spade has given way to the plough; the scythe, the sickle, and the flail are being superseded by machines for mowing, reaping, and threshing. The single arm is reinforced by combinations of wheels and levers to raise a weight far beyond its own unassisted strength, and as man associates with himself the beasts of burden, and the mechanical powers to multiply his strength, so for the same purpose he unites himself with his fellow men. The first thought of the projector of any great work is to form a company." The Bishop was forming around him a noble company for the noble work of evangelisation. He was always a great and "eloquent advocate and convincing defender of synodal action."

In 1867, at the Church Congress held at Wolverhampton, he made an eloquent speech on the necessity of Synods being fully established in England. He hoped "that the day would shortly come when every diocese should have its own synod, where the clergy and laity would be presided over by their own bishop.

In 1868, he took his seat in the Convocation of Canterbury, and the Archbishop declared that "the bishops received very great benefit from the electric force which attended his presence, and which was certainly something new amongst them at the time when he became a bishop at home." And now that synodal organisation began in New Zealand, and deemed quixotic in England in 1868, is the general order throughout the dioceses of England. His exertions led to the restoration of diocesan synods. From his first synod at the Waimate in 1844, flowed a wave of reformation and regeneration over the whole stagnant sea of the English Episcopalian Communion. Bishop Selwyn possessed a great "talent and passion for organisation," and his example became contagious. The treaty of Waitangi was signed on February 7, 1840. But for the missionaries it could not have been signed. It provided for the continuance of the power of the Maori chiefs and their tribes. All their rights of property were reserved. The Maori war was the result of a disregard of tribal rights. Te Teira's "right to sell was disallowed by his tribe," in 1859. The title was afterwards found to be defective, and in 1863 the Government "resigned the Waitaru to its lawful owners." The courage and disinterestedness of the Bishop shone out at this troublesome epoch in great splendour. He claimed for the natives "all rights and privileges of British subjects, as guaranteed by the treaty of Waitangi." Bishop Selwyn testified to the "good sense and right feeling of these maligned people." At this time, 1861, "a fanatical prophet persuaded the people in a certain village not to receive the Bishop into their nouses, but to offer him a pig's-sty for his night's shelter. The Bishop accepted the churlish accommodation, set to work and cleaned out the pig's-sty, turning out the pigs, and then cut some clean fern, and littered it down for his bed. His conduct astonished the Maoris and made them say—You cannot degrade him from the character of a gentleman."

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Governor Brown made a precipitate blunder. He should have "tried the Waitara question by law" before proclaiming war. Te Teira had no right to the land, which was subsequently relinquished by the Governor. The war was, therefore, unjust. Ten thousand soldiers took the field to prosecute a bad cause. The Bishop acted throughout as mediator, pacificator, and chaplain. While some soldiers were carrying a wounded man to the camp, the Colonel and the Bishop carried their rifles. "Some natives saw the Bishop carrying a rifle, and spread a report that he had fought against them. This poisoned their minds against him for two years. At last, on the occasion of a great meeting of natives, some speaker denounced the Bishop as one of their foes, when up got the wounded Maori and told his people the true story; and then all the bitterness and hostility turned to admiration and gratitude. It needed but time to reveal the whole integrity of the Bishop's motives, but all he did for both races during that disastrous period will, probably, never be known in this world.

Bishop Patteson said of him : "How often do I think with reference to him of a 'prophet is not without honour,' etc. Little did the Auckland settlers know of the man 'that standeth among them'; but let them say what they may, even they respect and admire him so greatly that his name must ever be a power in the land." In 1864 the Paimarire superstition broke out, after the departure of the troops. A lunatical prophet "professed to have received revelations from the angel Gabriel." It was an eclectic sort of worship—compiled from different sorts. Like Mahometans they propagated it by the sound, "and no restraints were put upon the worst passions of our nature. Under the influence of visions, some reverted to cannibalism. Something of every creed they adopted; they adopted the name of Universal; called their doctrine Paimarire (all holy), and their Hawhaws (or barkers), from their habit of repeating the sound 'haw,' accompanied by a deep breathing from the chest." Horopapera Te Ua was the name of the insane seer.

His native clergy remained loyal throughout. "The real cause of the war has been the new constitution; and the cause of the greatest bitterness of the strife has been the new element of confiscation introduced by the colonists, against the will and express orders of the Home Government." The colonists were entirely in the wrong in this business. "Certainly nothing could look more like a determination to provoke a quarrel than the Waitara business; where the natives had been allowed to kill one another for two years in civil war, on land questions, raised by our eagerness to buy upon disputed titles. And then the sword, which had been never drawn to vindicate the law, was drawn to break it, and war made in the name of the Queen upon her own subjects on a question of civil contract on the very spot where murders remained unpunished, and the chief murderer became the ally of the Queen's representative." The cursed greed of earth was the cause of it all. We acquired "one or two million acres of very indifferent land, acquired at the cost of per acre and many priceless lives; and of the entire repudiation of the Queen's authority over the whole interior of the Northern Island." Up till that time the natives were quite willing to sell their land faster than we could pay for it at from ¼d to 10d per acre, wishing nothing more than to have houses built, roads laid out, and Englishmen settled amongst them. But our war-cry was, "O earth, earth, earth." The good Bishop bemoaned the lamentable state of New Zealand in 1864. He, however, again began "to build the tabernacle which had fallen down." We neglected the natives, and they "choose for their own chief magistrate the old friend of Governor Hobson, and the constant supporter of order and peace. He soon died, and we took the earliest opportunity of quarrelling with his son, because he did not, or could not, coerce the island chief Rewi, who has been the chief, if not the sole cause, of the renewal of the war. All the young king's land has been confiscated, but little or none of Rewi's."

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This war cost England seven millions, to gratify the lust of land on the part of avaricious settlers.

In 1861 Patteson was formally consecrated first "missionary Bishop for the western islands of the South Pacific Ocean." Bishop Selwyn, in the course of his sermon, said that he had regarded, for the past 20 years, "New Zealand as a fountain to diffuse the streams of salvation over the coasts and islands of the Pacific Ocean, and that supplies had been furnished by the Church at Home with no sparing hand, to enable him to begin the work." Bishop Patteson would "go forth to sow seed beside many waters, to cultivate an unknown field, to range from island to island, himself unknown, and coming in the name of an unknown God. He will have to land alone and unarmed among heathen tribes, where every man's hand is against his neighbour, and bid them lay down their spears and arrows, and meet him as a messenger of peace. He will have to persuade them, by the language of signs, to give up their children to his care; and while he teaches them the simplest elements which are taught in our infant schools, to learn from them a new language for every new island. Already 60 islands have come under his care, and at least one hundred others, stretching westward as far as New Guinea, are among the number of the islands which are waiting for the Lord." In 1865 H. L. Jenner was selected for the new see of Dunedin, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the instance of Bishop Selwyn. He made a tour through Otago to raise funds for the Bishopric. This "thorny subject" reflects disgrace upon New Zealand. It was clearly a case of breach of faith. The fact is, Jenner was a poor man, and the Otago Episcopalians wanted a rich man for their Bishop. In 1872 and 1875 the English Bishops decided "that Bishop Jenner was the first Bishop of Dunedin, and that his claim to be so recognised could not in justice be withheld." Bishop Selwyn was of the same opinion. He collected the fund for his benefit. "I propose, therefore, to the donors, that I should be allowed to pay to Bishop Jenner, on his resigning his claim to the Bishopric of Dunedin, the interest which has accrued from the opening of the fund to the time of the meeting of the General Synod of 1871. My own contribution of £100, with interest, will be paid to Bishop Jenner, for whose use it was given." The Bishop of Quebec, in his address to his Synod in 1878, said that Selwyn was the most conspicuous figure, certainly the most active spirit, "in the first conference at Lambeth in 1867. The Quebec prelate also heard him deliver, in New York, before the grandest of missionary meetings, an eloquent speech which "held his audience under the spell of his burning thoughts. At the Church Congress of Wolverhampton, Selwyn was eloquent on "the necessity of synodal action working upwards from local to provincial Synods, thence to national, general and œcumenical. He predicted "that the time must come when the mother Church should have her duly-constituted Synods, and her laity taking their full share in their management," as was the case in New Zealand.

After 26 years of missionary labours the great prelate accepted the Bishopric of Lichfield, a diocese embracing Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and half Shropshire,—"three archdeaconries, forty-eight rural deaneries, 661 parishes, and 1,200,000 souls." Immediately he set about raising an endowment fund for the Bishopric of Auckland. He agreed to "guarantee £600 a year as long as he lived" to his successor, and one lady "promised to leave £5,000 by will." His furniture and library he bequeathed to his late diocese. "A near relative, who was anxious that he should remain in England, offered to provide by will for ever for the maintenance of the Bishops of Auckland, and he gratefully accepted it." So the great Bishop who had "rough-hewn the institutions of a nascent Church and a future empire, and stamped on both the impress of an original mind," began a reformation of the mother Church in England. He returned to New Zealand to set his house in order before finally cutting connection with the page 13 Antipodean Church. Bishop Selwyn was, on January 9, 1868, enthroned as prelate of Lichfield. For about a year "he was the occupant of two sees, 15,000 miles apart." He resolved, contrary to the immemorial practice of his predecessors, to reside in his Lichfield palace, and "to abandon Eccleshall Castle." Wherever he went, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "an electric force attended his presence." At once he began to agitate for "the division of populous dioceses and the creation of Diocesan Synods." The man who laboured so zealously for 26 years in Australasia, now turned his herculean energies in the direction of throwing life into the almost defunct organism of Anglican Episcopacy. In six months a "synodical organisation, similar to New Zealand," was established by the wise and "great master-builder." In October the New Zealand General Synod assembled at Auckland, and Bishop Selwyn, on the 5th, gave them a characteristic address, replete with prudence and wisdom. The Synod, in return, gave him a valedictory address.

There are now seven Bishops in this ecclesiastical province. He had acquired "wide and varied experience of many forms of human life." He was brought into personal "contact with men in every stage of barbarism and civilisation, on lonely journeys in the solitude of New Zealand forests, and on the waves of the West Pacific." Trained thus, God now called him "to quicken the very heart of the dear mother Church, so that the life-blood might circulate with fresh vigour throughout the body." They could not possibly forget him, for "every spot in New Zealand is identified with him. Each hill and valley, each river and bay, and headland is full of memoirs of him; the busy town, the lonely settler's hut, the countless islands of the sea, all speak of him." It may be truly said that he has stamped his mind and spirit upon New Zealand, and, in years to come," the multitude of the isles may learn the name of their first great missionary and rise up and call him blessed." The Maoris, also, offered him a grateful and generous farewell. On October 20 he left Auckland—which kept a general holiday in his honour—and went to Sydney, where he received an enthusiastic reception. Towards the close of 1868 he again reached England. He selected the Rev. W. G. Cowie, rector of St. Mary's, Stafford, to be his successor in Auckland. "During the ten years of his Lichfield episcopate, he confirmed, singly and carefully, 100,000 souls."

He raised the standard of Clerical Education in his diocese, and made his Theological College a real nursery of the Church. Bishop Selwyn, in 1871, visited, by invitation, America, and was present at the Baltimore Convention. He had done much to girdle the globe with a "circle of light." He was a truly representative man, "around whose name a halo of romance had for years been cast."

Bishop Stevens, of Pennsylvania, as President of the Jubilee Meeting of the Board of Missions, eulogised Selwyn in glowing terms. His diocese had "grown into seven dioceses, with their bishops and clergy, and that land which he found in a state of semi-barbarism, just, as it were, coming out of the benighted state of heathenism, he has left nominally a Christian land." Bishop Selwyn replied in a glorious speech. The man who had "planted in the most distant part of God's earth, in New Zealand, the Banner of the Cross," urged his hearers, with their "nine millions of square miles, with their vast population increasing every decade of so many millions of souls, to undertake the charge of the larger nations of the earth."

In 1871 Bishop Patteson was massacred. A man of culture, meeting such a fate, silenced and rebuked the sneers of anonymous scribblers against missions. Bishop Selwyn mourned his death and his irreparable loss to the mission. "He seemed to have suddenly become ten years older." Lichfield was the centre of missionary activity. All eyes were directed to its Bishop for help and advice in cases of emergencies. Beneficent clergymen of its diocese became Bishops of Sierra Leone, Auckland, Trinidad, Dunedin, and page 14 Argyll. When he became a colonial bishop there were only 9, and in 1873 the number had swollen from 9 to 53.

Bishop Selwyn was deputed by the Canadian Bishops to present their memorial to the Archbishop of Canterbury, praying his Grace "to undertake an office equivalent to that of patriarch in the ancient Church, and to convene a general conference of the Bishops of the Anglican Communion to carry on the work begun by the Lambeth Conference in 1867." On the presentation of that document in 1873 to the Upper House of the Southern Convocation, Bishop Selwyn delivered a really splendid speech, "fresh and unconventional, but aiming at nothing save the adaptation of ancient principles to new circumstances." He tola convocation, from personal sight and Knowledge, that the "seventy or eighty Bishops" in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, cherished "an earnest desire to be united in brotherhood with the Church of England." As head of 150 Bishops, he wished the Prelate of Canterbury to "construct a system" of confederation by the advice of the members of these various churches. In his own diocese he had established missionaries and probationers for the evangelisation of the ignorant masses of the Black Country.

In 1877 "the Bishop appointed a Barge Mission chaplain, who endeavoured to collect the bargemen for worship at their loading places. Every spare Sabbath the Bishop gave up to this work, so congenial with his spirit; but he saw that to really influence the canal population, a canal floating church must be provided, and he built a diocesan barge, which should move about freely, and in which he determined himself to navigate the grimy waters of the Midland canals with the same cheerful devotion which had carried him over the laughing waves of the South Pacific." He infused into his clergy a spirit for carrying on foreign missions.

In 1873 his younger son offered his services for Melanesia, and in 1874 left for his sphere. In 1877 he was consecrated at Nelson—a simultaneous service being held at Lichfield at 11 p.m.—Bishop of Melanesia. In 1874 he revisited America, and "attended the General Convention of the Church of the United States in New York." On that occasion he journeyed over Canada, and at Montreal he was present at the Provincial Synod of Canada. He preached the opening sermon at the Convention. In 1877 he was appointed prelate and chancellor of the Order of St. Michael and George—last held by the Archbishop of Corfu.

In 1877 he held his fourth Diocesan Conference. Here, at Lichfield, "he insisted with more than his ordinary vigour on the subdivision of dioceses as the first means of remedying evils and promoting efficiency in the Church." He had no misgiving as to the supply of clergy—ever) way adequate to the demand. The Bishop saw a source "plain as the progress of the rivulet, which, issuing from the little spring in the mountain side, is guided into the reservoirs, whence the water is distributed from house to house." The source of supply was Sunday-schools, pupil-teachers, Biblical and confirmation classes. He urged his clergy to "encourage the more promising of the young men who attended their ministrations, welcome them in their homes, watch over their habits, form their characters, and assist them in their studies." Then the "probationer system and the theological college would take up their work and do all that was necessary to send them forth well-furnished and equipped for the work of the ministry." Selwyn was an overseer, indeed! Such a Bishop we want in Dunedin.

Let us now, in the words of his biographer, "look at the principles which underlay the whole of that many-sided activity in the service of God." His convictions as a Churchman were thoroughly Evangelical. He led no party and enunciated no shibboleths, and, possibly, he satisfied neither Low, High, nor Broad Church. He was no passive follower of any man or faction. He loved the Church, detected her errors, and proposed remedies. For morbid and dissatisfied spirits, he recommended active service as page 15 missionaries. Had Manning done so, he might have been "the Xavier of the present age, and I could nave ceded to him at once one of the two signs of the terrestrial zodiac which have been assigned to my nominal charge. Among those fertile islands, crowded with living souls, and altogether untouched, we might, with such a leader as Manning, under God's blessing, have built up such a mission work as the Church has not yet seen." But, in place of acting thus, and "seeking the mind of the Spirit in councils of the whole body,' and remedying the English Church's "deficiencies, which are accidental and not organic," poor Manning fled to Rome. The "doctrines which divided less learned men and less humble souls into rival camps were discerned by him as being in harmony. Truths which to shallow, uninstructed minds appeared to be antagonistic, were in his eyes so nicely measured out as to produce a perfect equilibrium, like the physical forces which guide the planets in their orbits." He attached little importance to Ritualism. "I cannot think that candles, or vestments, or incense are matters which touch the conscience, because nothing can be necessary to salvation which is not contained in Holy Scripture." A conspectus of all the creeds—that of Athanasius included—clearly shows, according to Bishop Selwyn, that a definite faith is necessary, and that the maintenance of that faith to the end is a condition of salvation. Universal salvation and the temporary duration of future punishment he reprobated.

He judiciously held that "the experimental knowledge of the heart cannot be learned from books, or from meditation, nor even from the Word of God, unless the commentary be sought by self-examination, tested and corrected by close acquaintance with the hearts and feelings of other men. The death-bed and the school, the end and the beginning of life, are the seasons most full of instruction, for the simple reason that the mind in both states is least under disguise. Middle age is the season of self-deception. I think that I have found a hospital the best school of human nature. The more diversified the range of characters, so much the more complete is the lesson." He was both tolerant and courteous to others, but uncompromising in his own personal maintenance of truth. He always insisted on the paramount "value of religious instruction" in schools. The increase of the episcopate, the division of dioceses, and the consequent decrease of salaries, were always advocated by Selwyn. He himself began his episcopal functions with £1200 a year. "After thirteen years it was reduced to £600; after eighteen years it was reduced to £400; at the end of twenty-six years it was raised to £4,500. But amidst all these changes I never found the slightest difference in position, in influence, or my means of exercising hospitality."

According to Selwyn, "no Bishopric, as a rule, ought to contain more than 500 parishes, or more than 500,000 souls." As a citizen he was quite as consistent, fearless and independent, as he was a Churchman. "He had lost all faith in lawyers; all hopes of any politician caring for the interests, spiritual or temporal, of the Church, where such care imperilled the success or the power of his party." Consequently no party could claim him. On the burials question he would make no concessions, no compromises: "I hold that our burial grounds belong to the national Church, to be governed by its laws." Let Parliament, if it will, take them forcibly, it will be then our duty, "as loyal citizens, to submit." "He was not enamoured of the scheme of controversial lecturers, and hated the discussions by which nobody was convinced; and he held that the attacks of the secularists, and of the Liberation Society would be best met by a Church united for action by previous counsels and deliberation." As was to be expected in the case of such a great man, "there was the profoundest humility and sense of personal un-worthiness." For 50 years his life "had been incessant toil and self-discipline." In his last illness, "amid the wanderings caused by bodily weakness, his thoughts were with the distant islands of the Pacific. On page 16 April 11, 1878, the great Bishop died. His body, by his own request, was laid in a grave "dug out of the rock, on which the Cathedral of St. Chad is built." His gifts and virtures were various and resplendant. He was simple in his deportment, hated "all double-dealing, and his mind and conscience recoiled from diplomacy and finesse; he had the courage of his opinions, and was fearless and outspoken," but gentle as a lamb.

All testify to the "uniform nobility of his life, and the healthy, vigorous manliness which characterised his every action. Everything that is generally associated with true heroism, contempt of softness and comfort, indifference to applause or censure, chivalrous defence of the oppressed and weak, hatred of aught that is mean and sordid, resolute devotion to duty, obedience to discipline so implicit as to seem to be without effort, unquestioning recognition of the claims of duty in the smallest things as well as in the greatest." His character was "myriad sided."

The zeal of Paul; the tenderness of Barnabus; the asceticism of the Baptist; the beloved spirit of John; indifferent to wealth; parsimonious in the expenditure of charities; "shrewd and thrifty in building up the endowments of the Church"; a born leader of men, yet humble and obedient to his superiors; "with much of combativeness in his spirit, and resolute will, he contended never for party ends or opinions, but always for the truth, and even the very existence of controversy gave him pain." He sowed the good seed, in much patience and suffering, looking forward to a rich but distant harvest.

He was an eloquent scholar, and might have shone in literature. "He was hard and exacting, never praised men for doing their duty, and to none was he harder than to himself." So unselfish was he that "he never owned an acre of land in New Zealand; yet so keen was his artistic delight in beautiful scenery that he may be said, while "having nothing," to "have yet possessed all things." His character was so lovable as to attract the purest; souls, such men as Whytehead, Patteson, Coleridge, etc. People supposed that "his physical courage was very great," but it was not so. "He was naturally nervous. It was moral courage that overmastered his natural fear, that made him the undaunted champion of what was right and true, fearing nothing so much as the reproach of his own conscience." George Augustus Selwyn had a "commanding intellect and humble faith, unswerving obedience and inexhaustible charity, a tender heart and dauntless] courage." Such gifts, virtues and graces render "his memory and example a precious inheritance for all time." Bishop Selwyn was an aristocrat by birth, and educated in the lap of luxury and affluence; but he forsook all and followed the example of Christ. "What is the cure for Socialism? Surely it is the return to the true spirit of the Apostolic age, of which Socialism is a godless counterfeit. It is to take care that no child, no widow, no orphan, no emigrant, no heathen shall be neglected in the daily distribution of all things needful, both for soul and body." Such utterances outweigh all the arrant nonsense and magniloquent platitudes of modern Socialists, infidels, and revolutionists. So much for George Augustus Selwyn, the Apostle-Bishop and the "first illustrious Bishop of New Zealand," as Gladstone recently said. The two most illustrious colonists of New Zealand are unquestionably Bishop Selwyn and Sir George Grey. Both have been signal benefactors to New Zealand, and both have been animated by noble, disinterested, and high-minded principles, aspirations, and motives of action.