The New Zealand Company was ready to make grants of land for the purposes of the Church, but under conditions which should ensure that their property was benefited through the Church. They wished the Bishop to settle on the land they gave, and he was told that his future popularity would be sacrificed if he did not make his home and build his cathedral at the place they indicated. But Selwyn was going to promise nothing until he had himself studied the country. He said that he would “rent a house for his family and pitch a tent near to it a soon as he landed and the very next day begin daily service, never he hoped to be interrupted. He meant then to go away and visit all the islands and when his choice was made to move his tent thither and continue the services, and by its side build a wooden church, and outside of the wooden building to begin to build a chancel of stone in Norman style, and as soon as any part of the stone cathedral was finished the wooden work would be taken down.”

From the very first he wished to have some holy place set apart for the daily service of God, and he carefully superintended the making of the church tent which was to be the first cathedral of the island church.

Amidst the important questions that occupied his mind during these busy weeks of preparation, details were not forgotten. His sister remembers “sitting up half the night helping him to make a water proof belt for his watch and pedometer. He meant to swim the rivers, pushing his clothes in front of him.” During all his preparations the thought of the great spiritual work to which he was dedicating his life filled his thoughts. One who was with him at the time writes: “He said the ‘Consecration Service’ had lately been his constant study, and that after next Sunday (his Consecration day) his existence as an individual must cease, and that all his own individual interests and ties must undergo the change with him. Sarah (his wife) knelt down beside him and looking up in his face said, ‘I know at any rate you will not love me any the less.’ He stroked back the hair from her forehead, kissed it, saying, ‘Surely not the less but the more.’ He went on to explain that what he meant was ‘that his very being, with all its powers and affections must now be dedicated to God in a more peculiar and solemn degree than heretofore, and be absorbed into higher powers and boundless affections.’”

He was consecrated on October 17th in the Chapel at Lambeth Palace. It was not yet the custom to hold consecrations in the Abbey or at S. Paul’s Cathedral. There was not room for the many friends who wished to be with him in the Chapel, which was crowded as it had never been before on such an occasion. Exceptional interest was felt in his going forth, due to the affection and admiration with which he was regarded by so many, and to the sense of the brilliant prospects at home that he was gladly giving up to go to a distant land only just emerging from barbarism.

Two days after his Consecration, Selwyn received an offer from the Rev. C. J. Abraham, one of the ablest Eton masters, to come and work with him in New Zealand as soon as he could be free from the special work he had undertaken at Eton. To this offer Selwyn answered at once:

“I am quite overwhelmed with joy at your letter and have just risen from my knees after having poured forth my thankfulness to God.... When I think of the position in which the course of His providence has placed me ... I tremble at the thought of my weakness, and though I know the sufficiency of Divine Grace, still I long for brethren of a like mind to share with me the labours and the joys of the coming harvest. Men talk of sacrifices as a loss. I thank God that the enlarged comprehension of His scheme of mercy, which He has lately given me, has made me feel that no worldly advancement could compensate for the loss of one single moment of the peaceful and thankful and yet humble state of mind which I have enjoyed since the scales of all earthly objects of desire fell from my eyes.... I encourage you to cherish the feelings in which your letter was written, to dwell upon them; and in the end to act upon them; not on the spur of the present occasion, but with the calm, deep and deliberate devotion of a balanced judgment. Men think enthusiasm necessary to missionary enterprise. May we be enabled to show that the highest range of spiritual thought, the most entire and uncompromising obedience to the letter of the Gospel, being no more than our bounden duty, is compatible with the most perfect evenness of mind, and with the subdued and rational exercise of the understanding.

“Being called to the Episcopate at an early age I feel at liberty to look forward to a long course of pastoral superintendence over the Church in New Zealand. In that course many great and important changes must occur, for which I must be prepared.... Could I find a few men like yourself, who would silently work with me by the devotion of themselves and their means to the same cause, we should see year after year, parish after parish, archdeaconry after archdeaconry start into life, not with the mere appurtenances of temporal endowment, but with the provision of a living hand to give life and spirit to the institution.... Will you be one of the feeders of my Church, with the view of being in the course of time one of its pastors?”

During the farewell days spent at Eton and Windsor many friends gathered to show him their affection and to do him honour. At a meeting held in Windsor, he spoke again of the motives which had made him ready to go forth and of his readiness to go anywhere he might be sent, and of his deep thankfulness because “that land of promise, New Zealand, a land literally flowing with milk and honey, was to be his.”

The party that was to accompany the Bishop and his wife and child to New Zealand, consisted of his two chaplains, Mr. Cotton, Student of Christ Church, Oxford and Mr. Whytehead, Fellow of St. John’s, Cambridge, three missionary clergy, three catechists and two school teachers. Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Martin, wife of the first Chief Justice of New Zealand, travelled with them to join her husband. The Chief Justice, who had gone out a few months before, came to be one of Selwyn’s chief helpers and friends. The spirit in which he had entered upon his work is shown by the fact that he had impressed upon his wife that “the aborigines of their new country were to be worked for and cared for.” The voyage to New Zealand was in those days of course undertaken in a sailing ship, and the party were delayed some days at Plymouth waiting for a favourable wind. Those relatives and friends who had come to see them off were obliged one by one to leave. The Bishop settled himself in the ship on Christmas eve and held his first service on board on Christmas day. On the next day after prayers with those friends that remained, the last farewells were said and the little ship Tomatin was off on its long voyage.

CHAPTER II
EARLY MISSIONS IN NEW ZEALAND

Selwyn might speak of New Zealand as a land of promise, but he knew well that it had not yet emerged from barbarism. Its inhabitants, the Maoris, were a race splendidly gifted both physically and intellectually, but they were constantly involved in internecine warfare, tribe fighting against tribe, and all alike delighting to feast on the bodies of their captured foes. New Zealand had been discovered by Jasman, the Dutch navigator, in 1642, but no European had landed on the islands till Captain Cook sailed round them in 1769. His reports led to visits from traders, whose treacherous treatment of the natives was followed by cruel retaliations, so that the Maoris got a very bad reputation for barbarism. Their intercourse with some of the settlers in New South Wales, brought them to the notice of Samuel Marsden, a Government chaplain sent out to the convicts in Botany Bay. Marsden was a true evangelist, labouring under most adverse conditions and in face of bitter opposition, to do what he could for the unhappy convicts. His heart was large enough to make him wish to help the Maoris also. He welcomed such of them as came over to New South Wales to his house in Paramatta, and put up huts for them in his garden, where sometimes he had as many as thirty at once. One of the Maori chiefs struck by what he saw of more civilized ways, implored Marsden to send someone to teach his countrymen, and when Marsden Visited England in 1806 he went to the office of the Church Missionary Society and told the committee of the rich field that New Zealand offered for their work. The C.M.S. was then in its infancy. So far it had only sent out five missionaries, who had gone to West Africa. Marsden asked them to send three mechanics to New Zealand. He thought then that the first thing to do was to teach the Maoris something of the arts of civilised life. It was not long before he discovered his mistake and realized that the first thing needed was the work of the evangelist, and that it was through the teaching of the Gospel that the foundations of an ordered life must be laid. At first the mission seemed doomed to failure, but Marsden never lost heart, till in 1822 Henry Williams, the man who was to lay the foundations of Christianity in New Zealand, was sent out with his wife and two children. He had been an officer in the navy before his ordination, and his knowledge of seafaring ways proved of immense use in his new work. The C.M.S. sent him out with the injunction “to bring the noble but benighted race of New Zealanders into the enjoyment of the light and freedom of the Gospel.” With this object he laboured till his death in 1867, never once returning to England. Neither did Marsden forget the Mission. He visited New Zealand seven times, giving constant help and encouragement to the missionaries. His devoted work earned for him the title of the Apostle of New Zealand.