“I have given up house-keeping and have brought all my income to bear on the College.”
Mrs. Selwyn shared his work in every way in her power. She taught in the girls’ school and nursed in the hospital. In Judge Martin and his wife they had friends who sympathized with all their plans and gave them much personal help.
When visiting the mission stations round the coast in his little sailing vessel, the Bishop was always on the look out for new scholars. He wrote to a friend whilst on one of these voyages:
“Can you conceive a more interesting employment than hunting in this wild country for hopeful plants to stock my nursery at Auckland. One of my main employments during this journey has been to collect the children of the native settlements and examine them; and where I found anyone who especially pleased me, to invite his father to bring him up to my school. In no case have I met with a refusal.... I have no doubt that I can have as many as we can afford to maintain from all parts of the island. My Eton experience I hope will be of use to me in this search, for nothing used to interest me more than to form opinions of the character of the boys from their physiognomy, and then watch their progress through the school. I think that I have heard you say as a dahlia fancier that Brown, of Slough, is in the habit of growing thousands of seedlings in the hope of raising one rare and valuable flower; and so people, in the hope of rearing some few who may hereafter be admitted to the ministry. That they have intellectual powers of a high order I have no doubt; what they want is an entire correction of habits.”
The Maoris had learned confidence in him, and men, old, prejudiced and bloodstained had come to desire a better training for their children. He had well advanced plans for a second College in the Southern Island, but this he was not able to establish owing to the pressure of other calls.
The Bishop’s desire was to educate the sons of the settlers and the Maoris together, and this was done at first. He wrote in 1849:
“I must be a tyrant, and to be a good natured tyrant is the difficulty. The explosive element in all countries having a mixed population, is the disposition of the one to domineer over the other. We are succeeding at last, I hope in amalgamating the two races in an equality of privileges and position; but it is uphill work; it seemed so natural to every English boy and man to have a Maori for his fag. I think that by God’s blessing we shall succeed at last, and if we do it will be a glorious measure of success.”
This growing work made the Bishop anxiously eager for more helpers. He wrote urgently to Mr. Abraham who had promised to leave Eton and join him as soon as he could. The work he saw before him was too great for one man. He wrote:
“To move my diocese in any perceptible degree, I must multiply my own single force through a multitude of wheels and powers; alone I am powerless. Before me lies an inert mass which I am utterly unable to heave; and there is no engine ready by which I can supply the defects of my own weakness. I am bewildered by the multitude of details, and sometimes doubt whether I am right in complicating the episcopate with all the machinery of the subordinate ministries; and yet I feel that without that pervading influence, the whole system will be powerless.”
These words show what the organization of his diocese meant to him. He was planting a free and independent Church which was to endure, not doing a piece of individual mission work. Cherishing these wide plans for the future, he wanted helpers who could take his place when he had to be absent on his visitation journeys. “I have scarcely a person in the place,” he writes, “who has any eye for minute and careful arrangement, without which no barbarous people, I am sure, can ever be thoroughly Christianised. Throughout the whole mission the delusion has prevailed more or less, that the Gospel will give habits as well as teach principles. My conviction is that habits uncorrected will be the thorns which will choke the good seed ... to get that personal and parental care bestowed upon the native children which will qualify them to be hereafter Christian parents in every sense, is the difficulty which almost weighs me to the ground.” The smaller cares and the great visions of the future all had their place in his mind, but he could not help fearing what might be the effect on an over-detailed mind of the increasing serving of tables. He felt that he specially needed the help of his friend when “the very causes which most require earnestness in prayer made him unable to pray as he ought.