The boldness and grandeur of this scheme have hardly been sufficiently realised. An ecclesiastical province divided into small dioceses, with missionaries at their head, and its primate spending his time in the foreign mission field: what an object lesson to the whole Church New Zealand would have presented!
CHAPTER XII.
ORGANISATION AND PROGRESS.
(1850-1859).
The inward life must not be separated in practice from the external unity of the body of Christ. The law of unity is the essence of its strength, its purity, and its holiness.
—Bishop Selwyn.
"The urgent necessity of mutual communion for preservation of our unity ... maketh it requisite that the Church of God here on earth have her laws." So wrote the judicious Hooker in that immortal work which came to Bishop Selwyn as a legacy from his great predecessor, Samuel Marsden. The bishop himself was well aware of this necessity. We have seen how he tried to bind the missionaries to himself by calling them together in synods in 1844 and in 1847. The canons which were passed by these gatherings were doubtless of some importance, but their chief value lay in the spirit of unity which they were calculated to evoke.
Legitimate and natural, however, as such gatherings must seem to us, they threw the Committee of the Church Missionary Society into "transports of alarm." In England the synodical action of the Church had been so long silenced, that any attempt to revive it was regarded as an act of priestly assumption, and an affront to the supremacy of the royal power. But Selwyn's action was only a little in advance of the time. In all the colonies, men were feeling after some form of church government by which laws could be made and unity preserved. The bishops were sent out from the mother Church with Royal Letters Patent, which seemed to confer upon their holders almost absolute power, but the colonies possessed no machinery by which this power could be enforced; and it was evident that some method must be devised by which the different members of the Church could be brought together, and enabled to make laws for its governance and well-being.