“And then the thought came upon me with great bitterness that I should never see the dear old land again. But the mind has now settled down upon its new bearings, and the magnet of English interests and work begins to draw me on.”
Six months after he had left England he was back again, and at the age of 59 he settled down to the great new work that lay before him. With the details of that work we are not here concerned. During the ten years of his work as Bishop of Lichfield, he showed the same unbounded energy and devotion which had characterised his life in New Zealand. The experience gained there was turned to account in all he did and planned. From his clergy he demanded the same energy and devotion to work which he showed himself. He gave much attention to the training of the clergy and to the development of the Theological College which had been established at Lichfield. Sometimes he was considered exacting and hard because he demanded and expected so much of others. He had no patience with slackness and was not one to tolerate excuses. When a student to whom he remarked: “I have not seen you at chapel lately,” answered, “No, my Lord, I have had a bad cold,” he retorted: “I think your cold must have been bad since the beginning of term.” Always exact and punctual in keeping engagements himself, he could not tolerate failure in this respect in others. But the students recognized his anxiety to help each one in the College and knew that he was unsparing of his time in guiding their studies. One of them writes:
“We felt as we went forth to our work that we knew our Bishop, and that he knew us.”
The missionary spirit which had inspired him in his work in New Zealand and Melanesia, found its opportunity in the work he did in the Potteries and the dark places of his diocese. It was inspired alike in the Pahs of the Maoris, in the Pacific islands and the slums of England, by his profound conviction that under every human skin God has planted a human heart, and that it is the business of God’s servants to go and find it. So he visited workhouses, gaols and infirmaries, and started a barge mission amongst the people on the canals.
Many great questions agitated the Church during the ten years of Selwyn’s English episcopate, and in all of them he took active part. He laboured especially to make the Councils of the Church a reality and to bring about that Synodical government which he had always believed to be so desirable. In consequence, he used his influence to promote a second Lambeth Conference, as a means of bringing into close federation all the branches of the Anglican Church. But as was to be expected what lay nearest to his heart was to make his Church a really missionary Church. When he first came to Lichfield he found that about two-thirds of the parishes in his diocese did nothing for foreign missions, but he soon made Lichfield a centre of missionary activity for the whole Church and the place to which missionaries from far distant lands looked for help and counsel. No fewer than five missionary bishops were chosen from among the clergy in the Diocese. In 1871 at the invitation of the American Church, Selwyn went to the Triennial Convention held at Baltimore. Intercourse between the different branches of the Anglican Church was not then so close and intimate as Selwyn longed for it to be and as it has since become, partly through what he himself was able to accomplish. During the Convention, the American Board of Missions held its Jubilee, and to it Selwyn gave one of his great missionary addresses. He spoke of the coldness and backwardness shown in regard to Christian missions, which he attributed in part to the imputation of failure and asserted that there is no such thing as failure in the works of God, and asked how with the feeble efforts made, we could hope to evangelise the world; in part also he attributed this backwardness to the idea that there were races incapable of being taught, and contradicted this error by asserting “that there is not one single being on the face of God’s earth, who is shut out from the promises of the Gospel by any difference of intellectual or of moral capacity.” This belief he was able to illustrate from his own experience. The success of missions he attributed to the fact that “missionaries had been found who, instead of expecting wild men to conform to ours have made our habits conformable to theirs, who have followed them from place to place and won their confidence, who have lived the same rough lives that they have lived.” He told the Americans of the immense privilege that was theirs, owing to their vast population, of undertaking the charge of the larger nations of the earth. The Bishop of Quebec, who was present on this occasion, spoke of it as the grandest missionary meeting he had ever witnessed, and said that Selwyn held the magnificent audience under the spell of his burning thoughts.
It was after Selwyn’s return from America, that he heard in the year 1871, the crushing news of the murder of Bishop Patteson in one of the Melanesian Islands. Patteson was dear to him as a son, he called him the most perfect of men, and the news which he felt to be so disastrous for the Melanesian Mission seemed to make him at once ten years older. Patteson’s death bore abundant fruit, for it attracted attention to the cause in which so gifted a man had laid down his life. Those who had scoffed at missions were forced to think, and when we compare the way in which they were spoken of by Sidney Smith with the estimation in which they are held now, we can believe that the death of the martyr bishop was one of the causes of the change. Two years afterwards, Selwyn’s own son went out to work in the Pacific and in 1877 was chosen by the General Synod of New Zealand to be Bishop of Melanesia.
It is impossible here to give any account of Bishop Selwyn’s many activities and interests during these last busy years of his life. He never spared himself, nor sought the ease and comfort which he had long learned to do without. Sometimes his indignation with those unwilling to face hard work and self-denial showed itself in sharp and hasty words, which he afterwards regretted, for he was really one of the meekest and tenderest of men. To one whom he had reproved perhaps too sharply for neglected work he said: “I seem Sir, to have two duties to perform, first to take you down and then to take myself down.” Sir William Martin who had so closely watched his work in New Zealand wrote of him:
“To him work was no drudgery. He was the willing servant of a loving master; paying little regard to praise from men, rather turning aside from it, and giving to others the credit of what he had done or spoken well. There was no moroseness or asceticism about his religion. He enjoyed as few do, the beauty of the world. Being strong in faith he was daring, direct and fearless; stern too, when sternness was needed; yet withal tender as a woman to the sick, the suffering, the penitent and to children.”
In March 1878 his splendid strength began to fail. But, though weak and suffering, he would not give in, and held a Confirmation at Shrewsbury on the 24th. When in the vestry someone remarked on the vigour he had shown, he answered: “Yes, but it was like holding on to a ship in a storm. I held on by my hands and feet.” Sinking into a chair he added, “The end is come.” This confirmation was his last public act. He went back to Lichfield the next day. Then came days of weakness and suffering during which he still followed the work going on in his diocese, and bade farewell to those near and dear to him. In his wanderings he thought of the work to be done and said: “I ought to be there, I fear I am getting idle.” When Sir William Martin came to see him, he turned to thoughts of New Zealand days. His beloved Maoris were present to his mind and he repeated several times “They will all come back.” Maori words rose to his lips in his wanderings and almost his last words were in Maori, “It is light.” He died on April 11th, 1878, glad to pass from his work to that fuller light in which he so fervently believed.