BISHOP'S GREAT WORK

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 178, 31 July 1933, Page 3

BISHOP'S GREAT WORK

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SELWYN TRIBUTE TO SERVICES JUBILEE OF A COLLEGE. LONDON, June 23. Sclwyn College, the youngest of the Cambridge colleges, celebrated its jubilee on Juno 21. The inaugural year was represented by four clergymen—the Revs. F. Barry-Roberts, H. B. Clark, C. W. H. Connolly, and W. G. Melville—who matriculated in 1882. There wero also present two former masters of the college, Dr. A. F. Kirkpatrick (now Dean of Ely) and Dr. J. O. F. Murray. The site was a cornfield 53 years ago, when the college was founded by friends and admirers of George Augustus Sclwyn, ex-Bishop of New Zealand. Air. 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 Sclwyn had four attributes which made him typical of his age. Ho was a Christian, ho 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 temper ate in all things,” and “Bond to your oars. ” Sclwyn, said Air. Baldwin, saw New Zealand through the days of early settlement and through the clash of the Maoris and the British; he saw the Alaori wars which threatened to upset all he had been living and working for for years before. He. went out into Afelanesia, sailing his ov i boat, and founded the Afelanesian ...ission; and before he left he saw it organised and Patterson made bishop. He saw the See of Auckland established: he saw the Church .independent, organised, work tag right, through the islands of New Zealand. When he was wanted at home, reluctant as he was to leave his beloved islands, Sclwyn camo to Lichfield. In that diocese his influence became supreme, and he did a great work, ami when he died there passed one of the bravest and greatest Englishmen of the century. It was in the minds of many men to sec in what way they might commemorate his life and spirit, in something that, might live and germinate. and possibly produce iu future ages men of that spirit. Ideal of High Thinking. Such was the genesis of Sclwyn 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 possible in an old university to have a college to which mon of the most moderate means could send their sons, to obtain for them those inestimable advantage., which you got from the community of a university and their associations with tho age-long tradi tions of Cambridge or Oxford. Thus tho fathers of Selwyn were laying down lines which, ho was assured,

would bo 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 th, £30.000 that was all the college had to start with. Air. Baldwin continued: “I hav o been struck by tho fact that every college in Cambridge has its own particular soul. It does not always show it. to the outside world, but no on* 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 tho university, Mr. Baldv’in said: “1 have tried t<» 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 1 do—in a cricket simile—that 1 do not care who makes the runs as long as they aro being made, and it gives me just as much pleasure to sit on the pavilion stops and cheer the boundaries when they are scored as if I had scored them myself. Nothing struck me more than tho way in which, after the war, tho university seemed to pull herself together and renew tho mightiest days of her y uth. Hartl it must have been for a young college like Selwyn to take up the threads in 1919, but she did it, and the university did it. “No word has suffered more—and God knows our language has suffered in tho last few years—than ‘romance.’ I am bidden to attach romance to tho 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 that lovely word.”