We cannot close our sketch of the progress of Christianity in New Zealand, without some allusion to the Canterbury Association, one of the most remarkable attempts of modern times to colonize on Christian principles, or rather perhaps we should say, to carry abroad the old institutions of England, and plant them as it were full blown in a new country. The design was not altogether original, for the New England puritans of the seventeenth century, had led the way, in their attempts to colonize at Boston and in New England, in the days of Charles I. They would have carried out the principles, and worship of the Brownites to the exclusion of other sects, though happily for the freedom of religion, their design was soon found to be impracticable, and was only partially accomplished. The Canterbury Association was formed on high church of England principles, “avowedly for the purpose of founding a settlement, to be composed in the first instance of members of that church, or at least of those who did not object to its principles.” Its early friends now admit that their project was, in some of its parts, utopian and impracticable. The idea, if ever seriously entertained, of excluding by a test of church membership those whose profession differed from their own was abandoned by most of the colonists as soon as they had set foot on the shores of New Zealand. In 1848, Otakou or Otago, in the southern part of the Middle Island, was colonized by an association of members of the Free Church of Scotland; and in 1850, the first colonists were sent out to the church of England settlement, founded in the vicinity of Banks’s Peninsula, by the Canterbury Association. The site made choice of possessed a harbour of its own, an immense extent of land, which it was supposed might easily be brought under cultivation, and removed from danger of disturbance from the natives, of whom there were but few, an extent of grazing country unequalled in New Zealand, and a territory “every way available for being formed into a province, with a separate legislature.” The plan was to sell the land at an additional price, and appropriate one third of the cost to ecclesiastical purposes. The sums thus realized by sales of land, were to be placed at the disposal of an ecclesiastical committee, who were empowered to make such arrangements as they might think fit to organize an endowed church in the colony. A bishopric was to be at once endowed, a college, if not a cathedral, was to be connected with it, a grammar-school of the highest class, was to be opened as well as commercial schools; and all the luxuries of English country life, including good roads, snug villas, well cultivated farms; and good society, were to be found by the future settler, after a very few years of probationary toil.
The scheme was warmly taken up at home, and within a single twelvemonth from the 16th December, 1850, when the first detachment arrived, nearly three thousand emigrants had seated themselves in the Canterbury Plains. The towns of Lyttelton and Christchurch were founded, and operations on a large scale were fairly begun. Of course bitter disappointment followed, as it too often does with the early colonists, whose expectations are unduly raised by the romantic stories told them in England. But we must quote a passage from “Archdeacon Paul’s Letters from Canterbury,” just published. It may be of use to other emigrants, into whatever region of the world they go. “Restless spirits, who had never yet been contented anywhere, expected to find tranquillity in this new Arcadia, where their chief occupation would be to recline under the shadow of some overhanging rock, soothing their fleecy charge with the shepherd’s pipe, remote from fogs and taxation and all the thousand nameless evils which had made their lives a burthen to them at home.
“Alas! the reality was soon found to be of a sterner type—
‘These are not scenes for pastoral dance at even, For moonlight rovings in the fragrant glades: Soft slumbers in the open eye of heaven, And all the listless joys of summer shades.’
Long wearisome rides and walks in search of truant sheep and cattle; bivouacs night after night, on the damp cold ground; mutton, damper, (a kind of coarse biscuit,) and tea (and that colonial tea) at breakfast, dinner, and supper, day after day, and week after week, and month after month; wanderings in trackless deserts, with a choice of passing the night on some bleak mountain side or wading through an unexplored swamp; and, after all this labour, finding perhaps that his flock are infected, and that no small amount of money as well as toil must be expended before he can hope for any profit at all;—these are the real experiences of a settler’s early days in a young pastoral colony.”
Yet, upon the whole, the founders of the settlement consider that it has answered all reasonable expectations. None of the early settlers have been driven home by the failure of their prospects, and few have been so even from qualified disappointment. The plains of Canterbury have a thoroughly English look, dotted in every direction with comfortable farm-houses, well-cultivated inclosures, and rickyards filled with the produce of the harvest: and the great seaport of the colony, Lyttelton, is well filled with shipping. Christchurch boasts at length its college, incorporated and endowed. It became an episcopal see, too, in 1856, under the first bishop of Christchurch; it has its grammar school and Sunday schools. Here, too, as well as at Lyttelton, the Wesleyans have taken root, and, besides chapels, have their day and Sunday schools. From the first, the Scotch Church was represented by some enterprising settlers. The decorum of religion is everywhere perceptible; “I believe,” writes a nobleman, whose name stands at the head of the Association, “that no English colony, certainly none of modern days, and I hardly except those of the seventeenth century has been better supplied with the substantial means of religious worship and education. No one doubts the great material prosperity and promise of the colony; and no one denies that it is the best and most English-like society in all our colonies.... Sometimes a very vain notion has been entertained that we meant or hoped to exclude dissenters from our settlement. Of course, nothing could be more preposterous. What we meant was to impress the colony in its origin with a strong church of England character. This was done by the simple but effectual expedient of appropriating one third of the original land fund to church purposes, but this was of course a voluntary system.”
Thus New Zealand stands at present. The lonely island of the Southern Ocean approached only fifty years ago with awe by the few adventurous whalers which dared its unknown coasts and harbours, now teems with English colonists. The dreaded New Zealander has forsaken his savage haunts and ferocious practices, and may be seen “clothed and in his right mind,” and sitting to learn at the feet of some teacher of “the truth as it is in Jesus.” The face of the country has undergone a corresponding change. And in many places, the scene is such as to force the tears from the eye of the self-exiled settler; the village spire and the church-going bell reminding him of home. What the future may be, we shall not even hazard a conjecture. Let it be enough to say that a mighty change has already been accomplished, and that its foundations were laid, and the work itself effected more than by any other man, by Samuel Marsden.