CHAPTER XV.
MAORI CHRISTIANITY AFTER THE WAR.
Many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray.
—S. Matt. xxiv. 11.
With the departure of Bishop Selwyn, the Church which he had governed entered upon a new phase. It was no longer one in the sense in which it had been one. It still had a general synod, and it soon elected another primate. But no primate could be what Selwyn had been to the Church. He had watched the beginnings of every diocese, and had shepherded in person every settlement before it attained to diocesan status. The general synod was no real substitute for the influence of such a personality. It meets but once in three years; its numbers are small; its powers are limited. The real life of the Church has lain in the dioceses, and it is in diocesan histories that its own subsequent history must be found.[16]
But the change went deeper still. Hitherto the Church had tried in various ways to exhibit the Christian life in some visible polity or order. But the spirit of competition and commercialism had been too strong for her. The "smash" of the war period left the Church too weak to attempt to mould the forms of the nation's life. All that she had strength to do was to proclaim the old message to the individual soul; to gather together the faithful for worship and instruction; and to act the part of an ambulance waggon in the rear of the industrial march. Her influence may have been really stronger than before: it probably has been so; but it has been indirect, and it has been unseen. Humanitarian legislation owes more to Christian teaching than its authors generally admit, and it is by the humanitarian legislation of the last twenty years that New Zealand has chiefly influenced the world. Selwyn's successor in the primacy was Bishop Harper, of Christchurch; his successor in the episcopal see of Auckland was Dr. W. G. Cowie; his successor in the work of nation-building and social organisation was—with whatever difference and at whatever interval—Richard John Seddon.
But this lay in the future. The immediately succeeding phase of colonial life presents the same contrast with that of the Selwynian period as does the Hanoverian regime with that of the Stuarts. It was the period of immigration and of public works. New men came to the front—men who did not know the indebtedness of the colony to the missionaries. New ideas flowed in by every mail, and, spreading rapidly from mind to mind, drew away many from their earlier faith. The reign of Darwin had begun.
But, however it might be with the immigrant, the Maori remained a religious being. Strange, fanatical, repulsive, as might be the forms which his devotion took, he was still a believer in a world of spirit. Selwyn had hoped that this ingrained religiousness would have acted for good on the colonist. Of such influence there is little trace. The drawing together which might undoubtedly be seen before the war, had given place to a movement in the opposite direction. Here again Selwyn's departure was significant. There never came another who looked upon Maori and pakeha with the same equal and comprehensive love.
An incident from the days before the war may serve to show what, under happier circumstances, the Maori might have done for his European brother: