A History of the English Church in New Zealand

by Henry Thomas Purchas

—Genesis.

The missionaries had worked wonders in New Zealand, but the very success of their work proved to be its undoing. Now that the islands were safe and quiet, they attracted a rush of white settlers who were eager for land and gain. Instead of whalers and flax traders, whose settlements were only temporary, there appeared farmers and artisans who had fled from the misery of the mother country to found for themselves permanent homes in the "Britain of the South."

Many of the immigrants came singly from Australia, but from the year 1839 the New Zealand Company sent thousands of settlers in more or less organised fashion to the country on either side of Cook Strait, to Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth. This company was founded by the celebrated Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a man who had read and thought much upon the subject of colonisation. His views reflected fairly the public sentiment of the day. The colonists should be grouped in communities for mutual help and safety; they should have churches and clergy and as much religion as sensible men required at home; the rights of the dark-skinned inhabitants of the soil should not be altogether ignored, but neither should they be allowed to stand in the way of progress and expansion. The world was made for the Englishman: if the Maori came between them, so much the worse for him.

Such projects might well alarm the friends of the Maori, both in England and in New Zealand. They could not blind themselves to the fact that the coming of the white man had almost everywhere led to the disappearance of the coloured races from the earth. The influential friends of the Church Missionary Society accordingly opposed the New Zealand Company's plans in parliament, and prevented it from obtaining government recognition. Its emigrants went forth from their native land against the wishes of the authorities, and they naturally carried with them a prejudice against the cause of missions. On their arrival they were received by the missionaries with mixed feelings. Natural instinct led them to welcome the sight of men of their own race, but their minds misgave them when they thought of the effect which would be produced upon their converts. The Maoris were not yet grounded and settled in the faith: they looked up to their spiritual teachers for guidance in all the matters of life. Their faith was that of children, and for the time their safety lay in their child-like submissiveness to their teachers. How long would this happy state continue, if anything should dispel the veneration in which the missionary had hitherto been held?

The coming of white men had so far brought little but trouble. Kororareka was the one European settlement before the founding of Wellington, and Kororareka was looked upon as a sink of iniquity. A church had been built there by the missionaries, but some of the townspeople had approached Bishop Broughton with a petition that he would appoint someone other than a missionary to officiate within it. At Port Nicholson we have seen how Henry Williams had been roused by the high-handed proceedings of Colonel Wakefield. Hadfield had indeed won the respect of the colonists by his high sense of honour, and his readiness to use his influence with the Maoris on their behalf; but it remains true, on the whole, that the opposite ends of the island were set against each other—missionaries and Government in the north over against colonists and Company in the south.

Such was the condition of affairs on May 29th, 1842, when there arrived in Auckland the Right Reverend George Augustus Selwyn to take up the position of bishop of the divided flock. This remarkable man was then in the prime of early manhood, and he brought with him not only a lithe athletic frame well fitted to endure hardship; not only the culture of Cambridge and of Eton, where he had learned and taught, and the courtly atmosphere of Windsor, where he had exercised his ministry; but above all he brought with him ideals. These took the form of a strong centralised government in the Church. While yet a curate, he had attracted attention by his vigorous defence of the cathedral system, through which he proposed to govern the whole Church of England. But his thoughts had travelled far beyond the bounds of a merely national Church. Stirred by the spectacle (alluded to in our Introduction) of the dominance of Mohammedanism in the lands of the East, he had dreamed of himself as Bishop of Malta, or some other Mediterranean post, whence he might lead a new crusade into North Africa, and win back the home of St. Cyprian and St. Augustine to the faith of Christ. Curiously enough, some such scheme was actually on foot at the time of his consecration (Oct. 17, 1841), and one of his first episcopal acts was to join in laying hands on a bishop who was sent out to Jerusalem to endeavour to stir the languid religion of the mother city of Christendom. Being chosen to read the epistle on this occasion, Selwyn had selected the passage which tells of the Apostle Paul's last journey to the Holy City; and he had thrown such intensity of feeling into his reading of the words, "Behold, I go bound in the Spirit unto Jerusalem," that some of the other prelates were in tears. But he was not the man to grieve over what could not be altered. If it was not to be his lot to be sent to the ancient city of Zion as its bishop, he would bravely set forth to a very different field, and would endeavour to build a new Jerusalem at the uttermost ends of the earth.

His coming was eagerly looked for by both sides. The Wellington settlers confidently expected that he would fix his residence among them, and give to their colony that seal of legality which it had hitherto lacked. The New Zealand Company had been largely instrumental in carrying the bishopric bill through the Imperial Parliament; it had made large promises of financial assistance: now it looked for the support of the bishop in its struggle with missionaries and officials.[5] But the new bishop was not minded to become a dignified ornament of the Wellington settlement. To build his new Jerusalem he needed "an entrenched camp," and for this he must have a spiritual atmosphere, and he must have living material and suitable buildings. Instead, therefore, of going to the colonial south, he turned first in the direction of the missionary north. In less than a month after his arrival in his diocese, he had reached the Bay of Islands; he had captivated Henry Williams (who wrote, "I am afraid to say how delighted I am"); and had resolved to make his entrenched camp at Waimate, the most eligible and beautiful of the missionary stations. Here were fertile land and a farming establishment; here was a school for missionaries' children, which he might easily convert into a college; here was a church whose spire rose gracefully above the surrounding trees; here was a religious atmosphere already in existence.

But the bishop had no intention of leaving the European settlements untended. Before forming his central establishment at Waimate, he undertook a thorough visitation of his diocese, or at least of every part of it in which church work was being carried on. In order to appreciate the magnitude of his task, it will be well to take a bird's-eye view of the whole scene.

The North Island was by this time fairly well known. Though the Maori race had been terribly reduced in numbers since the coming of Marsden in 1814, still their pas were to be found in every fertile bay round the coast, up every river valley, and round the lakes of the interior. Large areas of uninhabited country were to be found in the inland regions, but these were either too mountainous, too barren, or too heavily timbered for such an ease-loving race. The Maoris clustered in greatest numbers round the warm springs of Rotorua, on the coast to the east, and in the extreme north; but their most powerful warrior was Rauparaha, who had migrated (as before explained) to the island of Kapiti. The tribes were all Christian, or ready to become so, and Selwyn in all his travels seldom found a professing heathen.

The South Island was still little known, except at the extreme north and the extreme south. At the north, the town of Nelson had just been founded, and farming had begun on the Waimea Plains. In the south, Maoris and whalers lived an isolated life on the harbours and islands of Foveaux Strait. A few whaling stations were dotted along the east coast of the island, but the maps of the time show the ignorance that prevailed. The sea is represented as covering the whole district in which the town of Christchurch now stands; mythical bays indent the coast; while the interior is marked simply by "high mountains supposed to be covered with perpetual snow," and "greenstone lakes" which occur in unexpected places.