THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 1909. THE GREAT BISHOP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14047, 29 April 1909, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 1909. THE GREAT BISHOP.

The local celebrations of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bishop Selwyn, which have the sympathetic goodwill of the entire community, are hardly needed to keep his memory green in Auckland. For his name is still interwoven with the story of its founding and its struggles and its development, as it is with the organising of Christian effort from end to end of our islands and the crusade against heathenism which he carried far and wide over the seas. New Zealand has been richly blessed from time to time with men of masterly ability and boundless devotion, who have served her in the forum and in the field, have guided her councils, have dignified her bench, have captained her industries, have moulded her nationality. But none was greater than Selwyn, whose genius—seemingly flung to waste in an infant 'colony and among oceanic islanders — grasped the latent possibilities of the situation and made for himself an imperishable name among the great missionary bishops by the amazing quality and quantity of his work. We can the better understand the strength of the great British movement, in which the organised colony of New Zealand was born, by realising that the yearning for the peaceful conquest of a new land had seized upon a man of • Selwyn's character and capacity in the fullness of his strength and in the full tide of his career. New Zealand was a wilderness, remote from civilisation, full of dreadful savagery, almost lost in the long reaches of a desolate, sea. Months of privation in small sailing craft had to be faced by tender women and cultured men and delicatelyreared children before they reached their goal on the grim shores of a barbaric coast, Yet month after month, year after year, the British Isles yielded up to the New Zealand movement the pick of their populations. It is difficult in these feebler and more exhausted days to understand what drove them, to catch an echo of the incantation which made men restless in snug British homes and women who had never known privation turn their eyes eagerly to the Far South. For this is certain, that neither want nor fear was behind them, that no sordid ambition or passing whim inspired them, that they came with an ideal as noble and as sound as that which drew the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic. In the Seventeenth Century men sought a land wherein they might be free to worship as they would. In the Nineteenth Century, freedom long crowned, men sought to plant in the Pacific another Britain like the Atlantic Britain they loved, endowed with all its strength, lacking only its weaknesses. Among these sturdy pioneers, who hold reunion to-day, came Selwyn, strong bishop for strong people.

It must have seemed to those who lacked insight and imagination that the pioneers of New Zealand, like Selwyn himself, came to waste their lives in barren ways. But the spirit of that great period, which shook Europe from end to end with political earthquakes, which sowed the seeds of abolition in America, which gave birth to South Australia and Victoria as well as to New Zealand, was peculiarly indifferent to size. The design of the universe seemed to it so vast that worldly things all became very much alike by comparison. Charles Kingsley was writing of the individual man and of the individual duty to others which knocks ever at all men's doors. Maurice was teaching unselfishness and modesty. All thoughtful men dreamed of a well ordered world, brought into subjection in its furthermost ends and freed in every part from tyranny and heathenism. Loyal Englishmen dreamed of New Englands in far lands, Englands where there would be room for all and where the evils against which Kingsley wrote and Maurice pleaded would be unknown. Only such a dream, of which the faint remembrance is like a glimpse of another age,, could have given New Zealand its foundation and its character, only such a dream could have caught a man like Selwyn or taught him how to work and with what purpose when he reached his appointed field; What he did is part of the history of New Zealand and of Melanesia. The manner of man he was is already part of our indestructible traditions. And though Tradition aggravates and exaggerates in order to impress, it is absolutely reliable as giving the l essential impression of an age and,is unquestionably more approximately true than the most careful personal recollection. Selwyn looms traditionally across the widening gulf of years as a heroic figure, bold as well as fearless, stern as well as kindly, endowed with the gift of tongues and with the organising power of a field marshal and ' with the ready hand and keen brain of a veritable Crichton. He was one of the 'men of whom Kingsley loved to tell. It may be that he gave to Kingsley his rudimentary idea of Gothic chieftainship. For he was a born leader, a born guide, a born teacher, who under no conceivable circumstances

could have failed to reach the front, and who left upon New Zealand and all Melanesia an indelible impression. It is true that he came with the office and authority of bishop to a people among whom the term meant much— does any man ever doubt that it was Selwyn who made his bishopric famous, not the bishopric that made Selwyn famous 1 Thus it will ever be. Place and authority alone mean very little but when fitting man is in high place, when strong man wields authority, then the world sees things' done that seemed impossible and Order rises as by magic from anarchy and chaos.