A SELWYN MEMORIAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19932, 28 April 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

A SELWYN MEMORIAL.

BY MATANGA.

BUILDING A CATHEDRAL.

The General Synod's advancement, of the project to build in Auckland a cathedral worthy of the memory of Bishop Selwyn is very welcome to New Zealand hearts. It is due to him and his great work as a pioneer bishop that this honour should be paid. It has tarried too long. Ho died fifty years ago. April, by the way, is Selwyn's month; the sth was his birthday, in the year (1809) that many famous men first saw the light—Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Edward Fitzgerald, Abraham Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes among them, and on the lltli he passed away. Maybe the thought of the' fifty years gone stirred the Synod. The project should serve the cause to which he gave almost the whole of his life, and in this aspect accords well with his own thought about the care to be given to religion. He knew better, of course, than to think it a thing of bricks and mortar. The strenuous simplicity of his pioneering methods denies the suggestion that real religion is impossible without an ornate house made with hands. He brought with him a little tent that went with him on his long and adventurous journeys. It was sufficient housing for his purpose. Many and many an hour of devout meditation was spent by him and others within its shelter. There fell a day when another such little dwelling held the first Bishop of New Zealand, the first Chief Justice and the first Archdeacon—" Surely such an aggregate of legal and clerical dignity," wrote Selwyn whimsically, " was never before collected under one piece of canvas!" —bat even more sure is it that the company makes the palace. A stable, once upon a time, became the world s most renowned throne-room, and a naked hill-top the resting-place of heaven's own glory. So the bishop pitched a cathedral tent" for a fortnight in Nelson, holding daily service for the natives, and this same tent did similar duty elsewhere. Round it the canvas beginnings of St. John's College were first grouped. Sometimes a barn, a loft, a conceit-hall, a dancing-saloon, a Maori whare, served well enough for a temporary place of worship. Often the blue canopy of the sky was all the roof available, and he found it good beyond compare. But ho longed for less haphazard and changeful habitation for the church. Buying the Site. Going to Port Cooper, afterwards Lyttelton, he was ill-pleased with the arrangements made for the fust batch of Canterbury settlers:

1 fin^^f e \Yste C n b ce rCL, Mone y enough has f'r>nrmunion in a crowded loft ° ver •tZ Ido not care for these things if they' are unavoidable: but where fo heen nart of the whole plan from the fust to DUt religion in its right place. I do object, to B P pacioua g and costly offices, long lines of wharves, roads, piers, etc., and not one sixpence of expenditure m any *o rn * the glory of God or for the comfort of the clergy.

Within a few months of his arrival in New Zealand in 1842 he chose and bought the site for the cathedral. Returning early in January of the next year from his first stupendous tour of the North Island —762 of the 2685 miles had been done on foot—he made Auckland by way of the Manukau:

I landed with my faithful Maori. Rota, who had steadily accompanied me all the waycarrying my bag with gown and cassock the onfy articles in my possession which would have fetched sixpence in the Auckland rag-market. My last remaining pair of shoes (pumps) were strong enough for the light and sandy walk of six miles to Auckland; and at 2 p.m. I reached the Judge's house by a path avoiding the town and passing over land which I ha o bought for the site of a cathedral. It 3 a spot which, I hope, may hereafter be traversed by many bishops better shod, and far less ragged, than myself. Prophetic Vision. Of this visit to the cathedral site, paid by Selwyn as he was on his way home to Waimate, Mr. gwainson, New Zealand's first Attorney-General, writes words well worth recall:

By the provident foresight of Bishop Selwyn, this commanding position has been secured for the iletropolitan Cathedral of New Zealand. And at some remote period, in the far-distant future, when the projected cathedral shall have become a venerable pile, it will be a matter of no little interest to its then ministers (should the tradition be so long preserved) -to read how, in the dark or early ages of Isew Zealand, AAJ. 1843, its founder, the first bishop, returning from a walking visitation of more than a thousand miles, attended by a faithful companion of a then, it may be, extinct race, his shoes worn out and tied to his instep by a leaf of native flax, travelworn but not weary, once more found himself on this favoured spot, arrested for a moment bv the noble prospect presented to his bodily eye, and cheered by the prophetic vision of a long line of successors, Bishops of New Zealand, traversing the same spot, better shod and less ragged than himself. Much a scene, illustrative of the hour and the man. in the hands of a true artist, would afford a fitting subject for a naintintr to adorn the walls of the future Chapter-house. An Example of Courage. If those whom the General Synod seeks to inspire with a resolve to sec the pioneer bishop's wish fulfilled' in • their time need any special prompting to give generously, they will find it in Sehvyn's own example. Windsor parish, the scene of his earlier labours, was alarmingly in debt, the deficiency amounting to about £3OOO. In this crisis,' he led an honourable effort to discharge tho liability, bearing a tenth of it by foregoing his stipend as curate for the next two years. This he could ill afford to do: he left himself without visible means of support. 13ut ho brought a new spirit of optimism into parish affairs by his courage, and the debt was extinguished.

When the New Zealand Church became independent, there was no longer any possibility of financial support from tho Home Government to tho diocese. He was unperturbed. " Twelve years' residence in New Zealand," he wrote, " have made me acquainted with the best places for finding fern-root and the haunts of birds and fishes, and I wish to state most clearly .and distinctly, and in all seriousness, that it is my intention to go back to my diocese and to dig or beg, if need be, for my maintenance, for I am ashamed of neither."

The greater the seeming impossibility of raising the whole amount of the cathedral's cost within the few years specified, the more truly will tho effort march with the indomitable spirit of tho man its erection will commemorate. As he lay dying at tho end of his brief episcopate at Lichfield, some words inMaori came from his faltering lips, and it was seen that his mind was harking back to the strenuous days of yore. " I am getting idle," he would say, and then ask, "Who is seeing to that work?" It was a question for endless answer, in the fidelity and sacrifice of tho Church ho organised so zealously in this laud.