MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

1.Portrait of Samuel Marsden [Frontispiece]
2.Map of North Island, showing Missionary RoutesFacingpage[16]
3.View of Paihia ""[33]
4.Henry Williams at the Treaty of Waitangi ""[49]
5.Portrait of Bishop Selwyn ""[64]
6.Ruins of St. Thomas', Tamaki ""[82]
7.Old Church at Russell ""[89]
8.Nelson Cathedral ""[97]
9.A Village Church, Stoke, near Nelson ""[113]
10.St. Matthew's Church, Auckland ""[128]
11.St. Matthew's Church, Dunedin ""[145]
12.Canterbury Churches ""[161]
13.Map of the Bay of Islands ""[169]
14.St. John's Cathedral, Napier ""[177]
15.All Saints' Church, Palmerston North ""[193]
16.St. John's, Invercargill ""[200]
17.St. Luke's, Oamaru ""[209]
18.Wanganui School Chapel ""[225]
19.Baptistery of St. Matthew's, Auckland ""[233]
20.New Zealand Bishops ""[240]

[TOC]

INTRODUCTION.

Beginning from Jerusalem.

—Acts.

A commercial message of trifling import may now be flashed in a few minutes from Jerusalem to the Antipodes: the message of Christ's love took nearly eighteen centuries to make the journey. For a time, indeed, the advance was direct and swift, for before the third century after Christ a Church had established itself in South India. But there the missionary impulse failed. Had the first rate of progress been maintained, the message would have reached our shores a whole millennium before it actually arrived.

But what would have been then its form and content? Had it made its way from island to island, passing through the minds of Malay, Papuan, or Melanesian on its passage, how much of its original purity would have been preserved? And who would have been here to receive it? Possibly, only the moa and the apteryx. Who knows?