BISHOP'S GREAT WORK

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21554, 27 July 1933, Page 6

BISHOP'S GREAT WORK

GEOBGE AUGUSTUS SELWYK • ____ TRIBUTE TO SERVICES JUBILEE OF A COLLEGE [fbom oub own cobbespondent] LONDON, June 23 Selwyn College, the youngest of the Cambridge colleges, celebrated its | jubilee on June 21. The inaugural year was represented by four clergymen—the Revs. F. Barry-Roberts, H. B. Clark, C. W. H. Connolly, and "VV. G. Mel-. ville —who matriculated in 1882. There were also present two former masters of the college, Dr. A. F. Kirkpatrick (now Dean of Ely) and Dr. J. 0. F. Murray. The site was a cornfield 53 years ago, when the college was founded by friends and admirers of George § Augustus Selwyn, ex-Bishop of New Zealand. Mr. Stanley Baldwin, who was greeted by hundreds of old scholars, including four who were at the college in its foundation year 50 years ago, said that George Selwyn had four attributes which made him typical of hig age. He was a Christian, he was a gentleman, a scholar, and an athlete—the complete and perfect man. They could not do better than take for their motto two of his sayings: "Be temperate in all things," and "Bend to your oars." Selwyn, said Mr. Baldwin, saw New Zealand through the days of early settlement and through the clash of the Maoris and the British; he saw the Maori wars which threatened to upset all he had been living and working for for years before. He went out into Melanesia, sailing his own boat, and founded the Melanesian Mission; and before he left he saw it organised and Patteson made bishop. He saw the See of Auckland established; he saw the | Church independent, organised, working ! right through the islands of New Zealand. When he was wanted at home, reluctant as he was to leave his beloved islands, Selwyn came to Lichfield. In . that diocese his influence became supreme, and he did a great work, and when he died there passed one of the bravest and greatest Englishmen of the century. It was in the minds of many men to see in what way they might commemorate his life and spirit, in something that might live and germinate and possibly produce in future ages men of that spirit. Ideal ol High Thinking Such was the genesis of Selwyn College. It was, as the speaker understood it, an ideal of plain living and high thinking. There was an idea in the minds of the founders that it should be pdisible in an old university to have a college to which men of the most moderate means could send their sons, to obtain for them those inestimable advantages which you got from the community of a university and their associations with the age-long traditions of Cambridge or Oxford. Thus the fathers of Selwyn were laying down lines which, he was assured, would be followed, and were already being followed to some extent throughout many of the colleges in Cambridge. They ought never to forget the men who started in the little buildings that then existed, with the £30,000 that was all the college had to start with. Mr. Baldwin continued: 'T hava been struck by the fact that every college in C;umbridge has its own particular soul. It does not always show it to the outside world, but no one of sensibility can be unconscious of it when he is among the men of those colleges. It is a tribute to those who have gone before us that even after a short half-century Selwyn may say that it has its own individual soul as a member of those colleges which form our great university." Romance in the True Sense Referring to team work in the university, Mr. Baldwin said: "1 have tried to play my part in life as a member of a team. 1 can say from my heart —and. I know many of my colleagues in public life feel just as I do—in a cricket simile —that I do not care who makes the runs as long as they are being made, and it gives me just as mucli pleasure to sit on the pavilion steps and cheer the boundaries when they aro scored as if I had scored them myself. Nothing struck me more than the way in which, after the war, the university seemed to pull herself together and renew the mightiest davs of her youth. Hard it must have been for a young college like Selwyn to take up the threads in 1919, but she did it, and tho university did it. "No word has suffered more —and God knows our language has suffered in the last few years—than 'romance.' I am bidden to attach romance to the latest divorce of some Hollywood film 'stars.' That is not the way to use that word, but the story of Selwyn College is a romance in the true sense of tliac lovely word."