7 DECEMBER 1867, Page 7

THE NEW BISHOP OF LIOHFIELD. T HE Government have made an

excellent choice for the Bishopric of Lichfield,—and we at least shall not be accused of partiality in saying so; for we hold that the new Bishop has done as much political mischief in his old diocese of New Zealand as a thoroughly good man in authority, without any largeness of political judgment, can usually manage to effect if he will; and since he has been in this country, he has lent his whole weight to the party which we believe to be intent on doing as much ecclesiastical mischief as zealous divines without a knowledge equal to their zeal can usually compass in ecclesiastical matters. Holding, then, as we do, that George Augustus, Bishop of New Zealand, has been indirectly the instrument of fanning the flames of grievous wars and troubles in his old diocese, and has no sooner set foot in this country, than he has done his best to sustain the most dangerous and mischievous movement the Church has seen for years, we shall, at least, get the credit of impartiality for our hearty approbation of the choice which has selected him to administer the diocese containing the Black Country, and our hearty satisfaction that he has been induced to accept that great responsibility. His very faults and deficiencies ought even to be of service to him in the work he has undertaken.

Dr. Selwyn is at all events full of physical energy, which is one valuable qualification for a Bishop of a most populous diocese, full of overtasked toil, and the ignorance and physical excesses which result from it. He was, it was said at the time, chosen for his New Zealand diocese because he was the only - man who could swim round the islands,—a figure of speech scarcely conveying any real exaggeration of his activity and force. He has himself generously depreciated the great evan- gelical services he has rendered to his diocese, by saying that the life of exploring forests, swimming rivers, and sailing for days together on the open sea, in discharge of duty, is an infinitely pleasanter one than the confined life of a London curate. But be this as it may, he has unquestionably,—though he is now fifty-eight,—all the vigour and, all the freshness of a man who has spent a large portion of his time in the open air.- Dr. Selwyn said, nearly twenty years ago, when he had been in his diocese only six years out of the quarter of a century during which he has been Bishop of New Zealand, "If there be any truth in phrenology, I believe that the map of New Zealand will be stamped on some part of the organic system of my brain. It is this intimate knowledge of localities, derived from frequent visits which gives such a peculiar charm to the whole country, and makes it seem like one's own,—and so it is ; for, like the gypsies, I pitch my tent wherever I please, or anchor my floating palace in any sheltered cove." And this has, no doubt, given a certain manliness and fresh- ness to his mind which is not at all too common on the English Bench of Bishops. He is, we believe, an accomplished navigator, —at least his journals show that he certainly knows enough to calculate his own place at sea, and rate his chronometer on shore,—and there is something of the advantages of a position which has never been cramped by too little solitude and resf, to be discerned in even his treatment,—narrow High Church- man as he theoretically is,—of questions such as those which now exercise his party. There is a manly simplicity about his style of thought which is, no doubt, in some degree due to the enforced liberation from ecclesiastical technicalities which has been necessary in so vast and rude a diocese as his. In his primary charge,—delivered after he had been already more than five years in New Zealand, —he intimated that he had found it better, in many cases, "to have no human teacher, to be a Baptist in the midst of the wilderness, often cast down for want of friends, and often erring in simplicity and ignorance, than to attach our hearts and defer our judgment to the wisest, the most pious, the best beloved, the most self-denying of men ; or to live in the very metropolis of knowledge, with store of books, amidst learned professors, with opportunities for counsel, time for meditation, with daily services and morning sermons, with all appliances to knowledge and all aids to truth. The search after heavenly truth may be as hopeful in the lonely mission station, or even in the vast solitude of a New Zealand forest, as in the schools of theology or the retirement of a college." Not only do we believe this to be true, but we hold that there are evidences in the Bishop's own writings that a truer theology may be gathered in such long, laborious wanderings as his, than he ever took out with him from home ; indeed, if he could have dropped a little of the latter more completely than he has done, he might have been all the better for it. Time for solitary thought has, at all events, seldom been wanting to the Bishop of New Zealand in the course of his long and often lonely journeys. And no collegiate opportunities for retired meditation such as he alludes to in the passage we have just quoted, could have been half as useful for the purpose of bringing home to the mind divine realities.

But besides being a manly and simple, he has been a thoroughly faithful and laborious Bishop. He quoted with hearty assent, in his first charge, the remark of the Venerable Bede that "the title of Bishop is a name not of honour, but of work ;" and he, at least, has always made it so, and always made the subordinate ecclesiastical officers of his diocese feel that their dignity consists only in the work so far as it is faithfully performed. "I appeal to one of my Archdeacons," he says, "whether I did not tell him, when he was following me on foot along the narrow track of a native path on the side of a wild hill, with a few faithful natives for our only retinue, that if I designed the office of Archdeacon to be a mere peacock's feather to distinguish one clergyman above his brethren, I would not offer it to the accept- ance of any one who had borne his Master's cross in retirement and self-denial in the mission field." Clearly here is a man who has not been accustomed to say with the Bishop of Oxford (was it not ?) when answering a question in the House of Lords, that the duties of an Archdeacon consisted in the dis- charge of Archidiaconal functions.' Undoubtedly, the faithful discharge of a Bishop's duties in so rude a diocese and society as New Zealand, has had a most beneficial effect in stripping Dr. Selwyn of those unreal ideas of clerical dignity, which are apt to render it all but impossible for some men to listen with patience and deference to the majority of the English Epis- copate. Dr. Selwyn will be apt to exult only in the good he can manage to do for the Black Country,—and to measure his failure by what he is obliged to leave undone. • We want many more Bishops than we have of this real, laborious, dignity-forgetting nature. Dr. Selwyn in taking charge of a diocese only too familiar with toil of a far more arduous and depressing kind than that which has occupied his own hard-working life, will be in no danger either of depreciating the evils of such grinding task-work, or underrating the rough strength of character which such a population usually boasts. The Bishop of Lichfield Elect has, again, gained, in his old diocese, a thoroughly well deserved reputation for the most hearty and genuine Christian compassion towards the least powerful, and most liable to wrong, among the people under his ecclesiastical rule—the Maories. It is true that he has, in consequence, constituted himself too often an advocate rather than a judge, and misjudged the English settlers with a pertinacity of partiality that has done more serious mischief than the most utter indifference and indolence on his part could have effected. Still, true as this is,—and clearly as it ought to show us the immense importance of a solid impartial judgment in a diocese where there are two completely different races in such delicate relations with each other as the races of New Zealand,—it is obvious that his fault has been that of a most generous and chivalric temperament, which is not likely to have any such field for mistaken action in the new diocese to which Dr. Selwyn is appointed, while the chivalry and generosity themselves will have the fullest scope. As a High Church Bishop, Dr. Selwyn is not likely to have many oppor- tunities of advocating the cause of the poorest and most miser- able of his diocese so injudiciously as to plunge them into war -with the rich or prosperous, and short of this, the more keenly he attacks the ignorance and vice and misery of his new diocese, the better.

The only aspect in which Dr. Selwyn's appointment is at all a matter of regret, is the weight he will throw into the Capetown and Oxford school of ecclesiastical policy. Saturated as he was in youth with the ideas of that first great Puseyite movement which ended in Dr. Newman's secession, he has not been taught even by the rough experience of his wild. diocese that those ideas of absolute spiritual authority which are at the basis of Puseyisra are traces of an infantine and immature society, and far better fitted to the infancy of the Maori than to the maturity of the Englishman. It is curious enough that his first duty in New Zealand was to moderate the eager- ness with which the native converts seized on the power of launching ecclesiastical thunderbolts which they found in the theory of English High-Churchism. "I find," he says, in his primary charge, "that the native mind has run wild upon the love of power and the eagerness to wield the censures of the Church. A native teacher will often do in his own village what I should have recourse to with fear and trembling, and only in extreme cases, in an English town The excessive rigour of native judgments, the public and unscrip- tural mode of trial of the offender, the absence of all desire to bring back and reconcile those who have been excommunicated, are evils which lie at the root of the whole native-teacher system, and threaten to overthrow it before a supply of clergy- men can be trained up to undertake their work." And the Bishop goes on to comment on the contrast between this Maori enthusiasm for the exercise of ecclesiastical censures and "the total absence of it in the English settlements." To his credit be it said that he incurred the imputation of excessive and mistaken lenity among the natives for steadily resisting this passion for ecclesiastical inquisitions and condemnations. He mentions in one of his journals that on approaching a native settlement he met a baptized woman called Martha, in deep affliction and tears, "who had been just expelled from the village for an act of sin," and that he had to take her back with him into the village, and induce them to receive her again. Yet he did not learn from this sort of experience to modify any of his dictatorial High- Church notions. He authorized his clergy to refuse to re-marry any parties who had been previously divorced, even though re-marriage were allowed by the Colonial Legislature, and said he would take on himself the consequences of such refusal. On all matters of Church authority,—though not on questions of personal authority,—Dr. Selwyn has always been rigid. He seems to have held at one time that it is possible and fight for clergymen to subdue private objections to the Articles and the Prayer-Book by an exercise of sheer will, and says that he who will not do so might be a good layman in the Church, but should never have offered himself for the ministry. With such views, we need not wonder that he supports the Bishop -of Capetown, and is for condemn- ing severely a brother Bishop, who, like himself, has studied carefully an original native , race, but unlike him, has learned from their simple difficulties almost as much as he has taught them. Dr. Selwyn shows little or no critical and speculative width of mind, with all his freshness, simplicity, manliness, and power. His theological influence will always be thrown into the scale of the sacerdotal-dog- matist. But he is so true a man, that we cannot but rejoice to know that he is about to enter on the conflict with English vice, ignorance, and misery, in one of the most crowded dioceses of this crowded country.