DISTANT VIEW OF SYDNEY
But from these scenes of private suffering we must turn aside. The public life and ministerial labours of Mr. Marsden require our attention; and as we enter upon the review of them we must notice two circumstances which from the very outset of his career exposed him to frequent suspicion and obloquy, both in the colony and at home, and formed in fact the chief materials, so to speak, out of which his opponents wove the calumnies with which they harassed the greater portion of his life.
He had scarcely arrived at his post when he was appointed a colonial magistrate. Under ordinary circumstances, we should condemn in the strongest manner the union of functions so obviously incompatible as those of the Christian minister and the civil judge. To use the words of a great living authority on judicial questions, a late lord chancellor,[C] “it is the union of two noble offices to the detriment of both.” Yet it seems in the case before us, that the office was forced upon Mr. Marsden, not as a complimentary distinction, but as one of the stern duties of his position as a colonial chaplain, who was bound to maintain the authority of the law amidst a population of lawless and dangerous men. Port Jackson, or Botany Bay as it was generally called, was then and long afterwards merely a penal settlement. The governor was absolute, and the discipline he enforced was, perhaps of necessity, harsh and rigid. Resistance to the law and its administrators was of daily occurrence; life and property were always insecure, and even armed rebellion sometimes broke out. If the government thought it necessary, for the safety of this extraordinary community, to select a minister of the gospel to fill the office of a magistrate, he had no alternative but to submit, or else to resign his chaplaincy and return home. Mr. Marsden chose to remain; moved by the hope of being able to infuse something of the spirit of the gospel into the administration of justice, and to introduce far higher principles than those which he saw prevailing amongst the magistrates themselves. In both of these objects he succeeded to an eminent extent, though not till after the lapse of years, and a remonstrance carried by himself in person to the government at home. Justice was dealt even to the greatest criminals more fairly, and the bench of magistrates grew at length ashamed, in the presence of the chaplain of Paramatta, of its own hitherto unabashed licentiousness. But the cost was great. He was involved in secular business from day to day, and that often of the most painful kind. His equal-handed justice made him a host of personal enemies in those whose vices he punished; and, still more, in those whose corrupt and partial administration of the law was rebuked by the example of his integrity. In the share he was obliged to take in the civil affairs of the colony differences of opinion would naturally arise, and angry feelings would, as usual follow. Of course he was not free from human infirmity, his own temper was sometimes disturbed. Thus for years, especially during his early residence in New South Wales, he was in frequent collision with the magistrates, and occasionally even with the governor. Again and again he would have resigned his commission, but was not allowed to do so; meanwhile his mind was often distracted and his character maligned. To these trials we shall be obliged to refer as we trace his steps through life; but we mean to do so as seldom as we can, for the subject is painful, and, since few men can ever be placed in his circumstances, to most of us unprofitable.
Another point on which Mr. Marsden’s conduct has been severely, and yet most unjustly blamed, is that he was engaged in the cultivation of a considerable tract of land. Avarice and secularity were roundly charged upon him in consequence; for it was his painful lot through life to be incessantly accused not only of failings of which he was quite guiltless, but of those which were the most opposite to his real character. A more purely disinterested and unselfish man perhaps never lived. One who under the constant disturbance of every kind of business and employment, still “walked” more “humbly with his God,” is not often to be found. Yet the cry once raised against him was never hushed; until at length, having rung in his ears through life, as a warning to him, no doubt, even in his brightest moments of success, that he should “cease from man,” it was suddenly put to shame at last and buried with him in his grave.
The circumstances were these: When he arrived in the colony, in the beginning of 1794, it was yet but six years old. The cultivation of land had scarcely begun; it was therefore dependent on supplies of food from home, and was often reduced to the brink of famine. One cask of meat was all that the king’s stores contained when Mr. Marsden first landed on those shores from which the produce of the most magnificent flocks and herds the world has ever pastured was afterwards to be shipped. Governor Phillip, as we have seen, had laid the foundation of the colony amid scenes of difficulty and trial which it is fearful to contemplate. In September, 1795, Captain Hunter arrived, and following in the steps of his predecessor, exerted himself in clearing land and bringing it under cultivation. To effect this he made a grant to every officer, civil and military, of one hundred acres, and allowed each thirteen convicts as servants to assist in bringing it into order. Mr. Marsden availed himself of the grant, and his farm soon exhibited those marks of superior management which might have been looked for by all who were acquainted with the energy of his character and his love of rural pursuits. Where land was to be had on such easy terms, it was not to be desired or expected that he should be limited to the original grant. He soon possessed an estate of several hundred acres—the model farm of New South Wales;—and, let it not be forgotten, the source from whence those supplies were drawn which fed the infant missions of the Southern Seas, while at the same time they helped their generous owner to support many a benevolent institution in his own parish and neighbourhood. Years afterwards he was induced to print a pamphlet in justification of his conduct in this as well as other particulars on which it was assailed; and as we copy an extract from it, our feeling is one of shame and sorrow that it should ever have been required. He says, “I did not consider myself in the same situation, in a temporal point of view, in this colony as a clergyman in England. My situation at that period would bear no such comparison. A clergyman in England lives in the very bosom of his friends; his comforts and conveniences are all within his reach, and he has nothing to do but to feed his flock. On the contrary, I entered a country which was in a state of nature, and was obliged to plant and sow or starve. It was not from inclination that my colleague and I took the axe, the spade, and the hoe: we could not, from our situation, help ourselves by any other means, and we thought it no disgrace to labour. St. Paul’s own hands ministered to his necessities in a cultivated nation, and our hands ministered to our wants in an uncultivated one. If this be cast upon me as a shame and a reproach, I cheerfully bear it, for the remembrance never gives me any cause of reproach or remorse.” Monsieur Perron, a commander sent out by the French government to search for the unfortunate La Perouse (who had recently perished in an exploratory voyage to the islands of the South Pacific), visited Mr. Marsden’s farm in 1802, and records, with the generous admiration his countrymen have never withheld from English enterprise and industry, his astonishment and delight. “No longer,” he exclaims, “than eight years ago, the whole of this spot was covered with immense and useless forests; what pains, what exertions must have been employed! These roads, these pastures, these fields, these harvests, these orchards, these flocks, the work of eight years!” And his admiration of the scene was not greater than his reverence for its owner, “who,” he adds, “while he thus laboured in his various important avocations was not unmindful of the interests of others. He generously interfered in behalf of the poorer settlers in their distresses, established schools for their children, and often relieved their necessities; and to the unhappy culprits, whom the justice of their offended country had banished from their native soil, he administered alternately exhortation and comfort.”
Indeed, it would be no easy task to enumerate all the schemes of social, moral, and spiritual enterprise upon which Mr. Marsden was now employed, and into all of which he appears to have thrown a force and energy which is generally reserved, even by the zealous philanthropist, for some one favoured project. Thus the state of the female convicts, at a very early period, especially attracted his attention. Their forlorn condition, their frightful immoralities—the almost necessary consequence of the gross neglect which exposed them to temptation, or rather thrust them into sin—pressed heavily upon him, and formed the subject of many solemn remonstrances, first to the authorities abroad, and when these were unheeded, to the government at home. The wrongs of the aborigines, their heathenism, and their savage state, with all its attendant miseries and hopeless prospects in eternity, sank into his heart; and under his care a school arose at Paramatta for their children. The scheme, as we shall explain hereafter, was not successful; but at least it will be admitted “he did well that it was in” his “heart.” He was often consulted by the successive governors on questions of difficulty and importance, and gave his advice with respect, but at the same time with honest courage. Amusing anecdotes are told of some of their interviews. A misunderstanding had occurred between Governor King and himself, which did not, however, prevent the governor from asking his advice. Mr. Marsden was allowed to make his own terms, which were that he should consider Governor King as a private individual, and as such address him. Much to his credit, the governor consented. Mr. Marsden then locked the door, and in plain and forcible terms explained to Captain King the faults, as he conceived, of Governor King’s administration. They separated on the most friendly terms; and if we admire the courage of the chaplain, we must not overlook the self-command and forbearance of the governor. With a dash of eccentricity the affair was honourable to both parties.
Another instance of Mr. Marsden’s ready tact and self-possession may be mentioned. Governor King, who possessed, by virtue of his office, the most absolute power, was not only eccentric but somewhat choleric. On one occasion, when Mr. Marsden was present, a violent dispute arose between the governor and the commissary-general. Mr. Marsden not being at liberty to leave the room, retired to a window, determined not to be a witness of the coming storm. The governor, in his heat, pushed or collared the commissary, who in return, pushed or struck the governor. His excellency, indignant at the insult, called to the chaplain, “Do you see that, sir!” “Indeed, sir,” replied Mr. M., “I see nothing,”—dwelling with jocular emphasis on the word see. Thus good humour was immediately restored, and the grave and even treasonable offence of striking the representative of the sovereign was forgotten. These trifling circumstances are worth relating, not only in illustration of Mr. Marsden’s character, but of the history of the earlier days of the colony.
But graver duties had already devolved upon him. Amongst the unpublished manuscripts of the London Missionary Society, there is one document of singular interest, in connexion with the name of Samuel Marsden. It is a memorandum of seventeen folio pages on the state and prospects of their missions to Tahiti and the islands in the South Seas, dated “Paramatta, 30th January, 1801,” and “read before the committee” in London—such was the slow, uncertain communication fifty years ago with a colony now brought within sixty days’ sail of England—“on the 19th of April, 1802.” Foremost in the literature of another generation will stand those treasures which slumber, for the most part unvalued and undisturbed, on the shelves of our missionary houses. For men will surely one day inquire, with an interest similar to that with which we read of the conversion of Britain in the dim light of Ingulphus and the Saxon Chronicle, or the venerable Bede, how distant islands were first evangelized, and through what sorrows, errors, and reverses, the first missionary fought his way to victory in continents and islands of the southern hemisphere. And of these, the document which now lies before us will be esteemed as inferior to none in calm and practical wisdom, in piety, or in ardent zeal tempered with discretion.
The circumstances which called it forth were these. The Tahitian mission, the first great effort of the London Missionary Society, and indeed the first Protestant mission, with perhaps one exception,[D] to savage tribes, had hitherto disappointed the sanguine expectations of its promoters. We trust we shall not be thought to make a display of that cheap wisdom which consists in blaming the failures of which the causes were not seen until the catastrophe had occurred, if we say that, great and truly magnificent as the project was, it carried within itself the elements of its own humiliation. The faith and zeal of its founders were beyond all human praise; but in the wisdom which results from experience, they were of course deficient. “To attempt great things, and to expect great things,” was their motto; but they did not appreciate the difficulties of the enterprise; nor did they duly estimate the depth of the depravity of the savage heart and mind. Dr. Haweis, a London clergyman of great piety and note in those days, preached before the Society when the first missionary ship, the Duff, was about to sail. He described to his delighted audience the romantic beauty and grandeur of the islands which lie like emeralds upon the calm bosom of the Southern Ocean, and anticipated their immediate conversion as soon as they should hear the first glad tidings of the gospel. The ship sailed from the Tower wharf, with flags flying and banners streaming, as if returning from a triumph, amidst the cheers of the spectators. Amongst the crowd there stood a venerable minister of Christ, leaning upon the arm of one who still survives—himself a veteran in the service of his Lord. As they turned slowly away from the exciting scene, the aged minister mournfully exclaimed, “I am afraid it will not succeed: there is too much of man in it.” His words were prophetic; for nearly twenty years no success followed, but one sweeping tide of disappointment and disaster;[E] till, at length, when, humbled and dejected, about the year 1814, the missionaries, as well as the Society at home, in despair had almost resolved to abandon the station, the work of God appeared in the conversion of the king of Tahiti; and with a rapidity to be compared only to the long, cheerless, period in which they had “laboured in vain, and spent their strength for nought,” the missionaries beheld not only Tahiti, but the adjacent islands transformed into Christian lands.
It was in the midst of these disasters that Mr. Marsden was consulted, and wrote the memorandum to which we have referred. If in some places he seems to lay too great stress upon what may appear to the reader prudential considerations of inferior importance, let us remind him that on these very points the missionaries had betrayed their weakness. Their own quarrels and even the gross misconduct of some few amongst them, were not less painful to the church at home than their want of success.