FOOTNOTES:
[A] This was published in 1845.
[B] See Wentworth’s Colony of New South Wales, second edition, 1820.
CHAPTER III.
Mr. Marsden appointed to the Magistracy—Objections to this considered—Cultivates Land—Charge of Secularity considered—His connexion with the London Missionary Society, and care of its Polynesian Mission—Revisits England in 1807.
The retirement of the senior chaplain left Mr. Marsden in sole charge of the spiritual concerns of the infant colony. He had now to officiate at the three settlements of Sydney, Paramatta, and Hawkesbury without assistance. The nature of the population, consisting as it did of a mass of criminals, rendered his ministerial labours peculiarly distressing. The state of morals was utterly depraved; oaths and ribaldry, and audacious lying were universal; marriage, and the sacred ties of domestic life, were almost unknown, and those who, from their station, should have set an example to the convicts and settlers, encouraged sin in others by the effrontery of their own transgressions. Under discouragement such as would have subdued the spirit of most men, did he, for the long period of fourteen years, continue at his post; cheered it is true with occasional gleams of success, but upon the whole rather a witness against abounding vice, than, at present, a successful evangelist. Nor were domestic trials wanting to complete that process of salutary discipline by which “the great Shepherd of the sheep” was preparing his servant for other and wider scenes of labour, and for triumphs greater than the church in these later days had known. His firstborn son, a lovely and promising child scarcely two years old, was thrown from its mother’s arms by a sudden jerk of the gig in which they were seated, and killed upon the spot. It would be impossible to describe the agonized feelings of the mother under such a bereavement, nor were the sorrows of the father less profound. He received the tidings, together with the body of his lifeless boy, we are told, with “calm, and even dignified submission,” for “he was a man who said little though he felt much.” A second stroke, still more painful, was to follow. Mrs. Marsden, determined not to hazard the safety of another child, left her babe at home in charge of a domestic while she drove out. But her very precaution was the occasion of his death: the little creature strayed into the kitchen unobserved, fell backwards into a pan of boiling water, and its death followed soon after. Thus early in his ministerial career the iron entered his own soul, and taught him that sympathy for the wounded spirit which marked his character through life.
