MELANESIAN MISSION.

North Otago Times, Volume III, Issue 48, 19 January 1865, Page 1 (Supplement)

MELANESIAN MISSION.

The following is extracted from a report of this mission published recently in the home papers : — "The Mission, as is well known, is a direct outgrowth of the Episcopal Church in this Colony in the person of the first Bishop of New Zealand; his friend and disciple, Bishop Patteson, has for some years continued the enterprise which the noble-hearted Primate began. It was a region in which, from the nature of the case, no aid would for a long time, if ever, be supplied by those for whose benefit the Mission was undertaken. The climate of the islands forbade the constant residence of Europeans upon them ; and the co-existence of a hundred dialects made speedy progress in the work of conversion impossible. The only practicable Mission policy was full of labor and peril ; but the two Bishops have nobly faced the danger and endured the toil. Every new island on which they landed was unexplored ground ; and it was impossible for them to tell whether some act of carelessness or brutality done by the crew of a passing ship might not have left a score to be wiped out by vengeance on the white man's head. And how, after all, could it be known what these poor islanders really felt or thought ? To plant a hundred English missionaries on as many insular homes would have been a waste of life, even if there had been a sufficiency of men ; nor would missionaries of the average stamp have made much progress in a lifetime towards the mastery of the Melanesian tongues. Bishop Patteson has shown how the read} 7 linguist and the laborious missionary may be united in one person. He has sailed year after year to the Archipelago which stretches with its two hundred islands or more from New Guinea to a point within 800 miles of Ne vv Zealand itself. With rare tact and skill he has induced the youths from many of the tribes which inhabit them to commit themselves to his care, and has sailed with them to Auckland, where he could educate them for the six months of the Southern summer, until the cold required him to restore the children to the tropics of their homes, or to the winter school at Mota, where his fellow-laborers are at work -with 100 boys, tfear after year is this difficult and laborious work carried on, as the Southern Cross performs her repeated voyages and drops her anchor wherever the sight of native villages among the cocoa palms and banian trees invites a call. Sometimes, as in 1863, an epidemic in the Mission, or, as in an earlier year, the loss of the Mission schooner, may derange all the Bishop's plans ; often the contradiction of winds and waves may hinder him from visiting places on which his heart is set. But none ot these discouragements put a stop to the work ; and by gradual, but not imperceptible, advances, -he is opening communications with the whole Melanesian group, digesting their languages into a system, making their young men his scholars and friends, and preparing the way for their conversion to Christ. And the item, in the account before us, of the stipends of the men who are doing this work shows a total of nothing to the Bishop, and of less than L600 to the four clergymen who are working under his guidance. Truly here is a balance-sheet out of which even a smart writer in the " Times " would find it difficult to make a case against the conduct of Christian missions. Here is higher and harder work than that of composing sarcastic articles in the interest of scepticism, and not nearly so well paid. It is satisfactory to see in exact detail how the charges of the Mission ■ schooner, and of the schools in which the Melanesian youths are received,, are provided for. From every diocese in New Zealand, and nearly all in Australia, colonists are beginning to repay the debt due -for spiritual benefits to themselves by contributing to this admirable Mission. From England come, kindly and religious offerings which the Bishops friends, at Eton and elsewhere, have raised for him year by year without requiring him to leave the scene of his labors for a triennial circuit of English platforms."