instant between contingent failure and permanent dishonour. I suppose we should not like to hear it said of our Church that, like all bodies corporate, it is a body without a soul or conscience. We should none of us care to attribute to our Church the 'pouvoir prochain' of the Jesuits, which Pascal's irony turned to ridicule; or to insinuate that she has every capacity of action, but neither the ability nor the will to act.
Churchmen certainly will not quarrel with this position, viz.,—that our past system has no sanction from antiquity. The Apostles did not plant churches by driblets, fragments, instalments; not bit by bit; not by sending out here and there a separate disjointed limb; not the limbs first and the head afterwards; but by gathering together the separate members into one body under one common visible head; just as the loadstone attracts scattered atoms to a common centre of unity. They planted the church entire; they did not plant episcopacy without a bishop.
The waste territory of New Zealand, the outskirts and shores of which are now only just being fringed with settlers, throws open a wide field for the commencement of such a work; for the operation of a revived spirit of true religious colonization.
It is plain, however, that this revival must take place amongst the laity as well as amongst the clergy; it would be more correct to say, that it must be communicated from and by the clergy to the laity. There is not a subject, having a direct bearing upon the social welfare of the people of this country, which is so little understood as that of colonization. The sympathies of society are yet to be enlisted in its behalf; unreasonable prejudices require to be removed; a knowledge of it to be generally diffused. The clergy must undertake this duty if they would gain the co-operation of the laity; for this is clear beyond a doubt, that when a matter of public usefulness or public beneficence is fairly brought under the consideration of the laity of England, they enter upon it cheerfully, and with munificence, as men in earnest working for an end and anxious to reach it. A colonizing clergy, without a colonizing laity, is but a poor instrument. Separate, either will accomplish little—united, what may not be accomplished? It is only by an intimate union and co-operation between the two that the Church's labour, under God's blessing, can be wrought out, and the Redeemer's triumph finally accomplished. That union, if God shall prosper it, will lead to the spread of the Gospel by the Church throughout the yet untrodden Continent and the countless islands of the Southern World.
The proposed Settlement of Canterbury, in New Zealand, offers a starting point for the immediate activity of this revived spirit of true colonization.
If it be desirable to found a happy home for the swarming multitudes of our increasing population—if it be a blessed consolation to reflect, that when our sons and daughters are compelled by an imperative necessity to quit our side, they shall not be cast forth as waifs and strays into the wide world, doomed in the midst of material plenty to intellectual ignorance and hopeless irreligion—if it might almost heal the pang of parting with them, perhaps for ever, to be assured that in the land of their adoption they shall find the same faith, the same charities, the same morals, which still adorn and sanctify their fatherland—then, I say, upon us be the fault, if this glorious vision shall fail to be realized for our emigrants, who are about to found the Settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand. The almost heroic bishop of that country, (Dr. Selwyn, whose devotedness can find its equal only in primitive ages,) in a recently published letter,[1] has represented the natural features of the proposed Settlement as presenting 'a picture, which needs only the true manna of God's blessing to fulfil every promise which he ever made to his chosen people, to the happy settlers who may hereafter occupy this fair land in the spirit of simplicity and faith.'
It remains for the Church to be the angel of that true manna. She can assume the sacred embassy if she will. The will alone is wanting. There is no other hindrance in her way. The ground is yet unoccupied. No settler has set foot there. Only one lofty spirit, forsaking station, hereditary fortune, fair pros-
