A BIOGRAPHY OF BISHOP SELWYN.* IT would seem that there
has been a considerable demand for this book. The fact may be taken as a proof that the public are very anxious to have a good biography of so emphatically "noble a fellow" as George Selwyn. It must not be taken as a compliment to Mr. Tucker. This is not that gentleman's first venture as a biographer of Bishops, but unless he takes some lessons in his art, and profits by them, it is sincerely to be hoped that it will be his last. In the beginning of one of the Brolxlignagian sentences which load his pages, be says :—" It has been no book-making in- stinct, but a true appreciation of the value of high example and sacred memories, which has given us the biographies of the great pioneers of the Church in these last days." It is to be regretted that, in addition to good intentions and admiration for his hero, Mr. Tucker had not had enough of the bookmaker's instinct to seek to make his volumes readable. Contrast this work with the productions of another biographer of mission- aries, Dr. George Smith, and you can at once see Mr. Tucker's deficiencies. You may smile at some of the pas- sages in Dr. Smith's life of Selwyn's eminent Presbyterian contemporary, Alexander Duff, but you cannot help reading the book straight off, and through it seeing Duff, as the brother - religionists, both of him and of his biographer would say, "eye to eye and face to face." Mr. Tucker has neither capacity nor patience for portraiture of this kind. To him, George Augustus Selwyn is nothing; "U. A. New Zealand " and " G. A. Lichfield" are everything. We are, indeed, hurriedly informed that a man of the first name was born in 1810; that he was a member of a family that he has been a credit to, and which has been a credit
• Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Arguelles &hems, AD.. Bishop of Nets Zsolead, 1841-1869: Bishop of Lichfield, 1887-1878. By the Rev. R. W. Tacker, M. 2 vol.. London: William Wella Gardner. 1879. Jo him ; that at Eton and Oxford he was a good classic and an athlete; that he married ; and that ten years after ordina-
tion, he was sent out to New Zealand, and was a Bishop ever afterwards. But what about his every-day life,—his moods, emotions, caprices ? Soldier of the Cross he was, if ever man was ; but was his foot never out of the stirrup ; did he never lounge lazily on the grass in undress, and with well- deserved "modest quencher" of claret-cup in hand ? He was an exemplary son, brother, husband, and father, but did he never indulge in a little harmless fun ? We believe he did, as every man with his splendid physical endowments and his genuine love for nature must do. Indeed, Mr. Tucker occasionally gives us glimpses of Selwyn when not in missionary buckram. We have an amusing account of his domestic arrangements after he arrived in New Zealand ; there is a tinge of humour in a letter to one of his sons on the value of a public-school training for knocking the " nonsense " out of a boy, and Mr. Tucker tells us that he " chuckled " when he 'overheard some one calling him "that old fool of a bishop." But these glimpses are few and far between.
This is not the only or the chief fault to be found with Mr. Tucker. He despises the bookmaker, but he must have hurried through his preparation for this work as few bookmakers do. He had an excellent chance of giving us the outs and ins of the relations between the colonists and the Maoris in New Zealand ; but this portion of the book is a con- fused, unintelligible piece of "scamp-work." We are told in effect nothing more than this,—that Selwyn was always irr the right, and everybody else was in the wrong. Now this is more than doubtful. Selwyn's conscience was always right ; his judgment frequently erred. He was not, as Joseph Hume called him, "a turbulent priest," but beyond all doubt he " fussed " too much and too often, When, moreover, the Maori war broke out, in 1860, Selwyn, even allowing that he was correct in his fundamental contention that the colonists were to blame in their first dealings with the Maoris, allowed his own friendly dealings with his converts to blind him to certain facts, such as that the famous dispute with the notorious William King was one not only of title to a particular piece of ground, but of British v. Native authority. Finally, Mr. Tucker need not have given us an account of Selwyn's Lichfield episcopate at all, for all he can tell us apparently amounts to this—that he was opposed to the Burials Bill, that he did his duty according to his light, and that he paid two visits to North America and one to the scene of his former labours. The biography of Selwyn has yet to be written ; it must be a work of time and of patience.
Poor portrait though this is, the subject is one of the best that the Anglican Church has ever given. Selwyn was not -what Mr. Greg calls a " ruminating " man ; his faith was un- questioning; and he did not see that the best missionary of the day is he who combats cultured and reverent unbelief at home, not
he who converts and educates savagery abroad. In theology and politics, his position is not easy to define,—is, indeed, hardly worth defining. Thus he had no troubles about the burials
question. He declared emphatically, "I have no concessions to offer, no compromises to accept. I hold that our burial- grounds belong to the National Church, to be governed by its laws ; not to the nation, to be dealt with as they please." He cannot be called a Low Churchman ; he was certainly not a Broad Churchman ; his sympathies were with the Oxford movement, but yet these must be taken along with such a
'declaration as this, which we take from this olla podrida of letters, pastorals, and the like, which Mr. Tucker considers a memoir :— "I am not called upon to censure men whose private character I revere, while I differ widely from the conclusion to which some of them have been led. While it seemed that the one object of all their endeavours was to develop in all its fullness the actual system of the Anglican Church, neither adding aught to it, nor taking away aught from it : but purifying its corruptions, calling forth its latent energies, en- couraging its priesthood to higher aims, and to a more holy and self- denying life ; exhorting us to fast, and watch, and pray, more fre- quently and more earnestly ; to be more abundant in our almsgiving, more diffusive in our charity ; and to that end to retrench our expendi- ture, and to look upon ourselves as the stewards of God,—in one word, while they seemed to teach us to do in our own system and ritual -what the Apostles did in their days, and what our own Church still prescribes ; I felt that I could not disobey their calling, because it was not theirs, but the voice of my Holy Mother whom I had sworn to obey, and the example of the Apostles, which it was my heart's desire to follow. But when a change came upon the spirit of their teaching, and it seemed as if our own Church were not good enough to retain their allegiance ; when, instead of the unity for which we
had prayed, we seemed to be on the verge of a frightful schism ; then indeed I shrank back, as if a voice had spoken within me : Not one step further ; for I love my Church in which I was born to God, and by His help I will love her unto the end."
But if Selwyn was not an" all-round" ecclesiastic, if he was not made to be the stroke-oar of his Church, he made an admirable
"bow." One has but to look at his portrait—that in the first volume, not that of the somewhat battered hero of the Southern Cross returned to Lichfield to die, which figures in the second —to see that Selwyn was a noble specimen of the moral aristo- crat, and therefore cut out beyond most men to do missionary work. No man, even in the noble army of martyr-bishops, spent and was spent as completely as Selwyn in the course of his mission. Morally, rather than physically, courageous by nature, he yet exposed himself as fearlessly as Patteson himself could have done to the dangers of the sea, to the treachery and the open hostility of natives. The account of his forty visitations is a tale of Pauline activity ; he travelled
2,277 miles, 762 on foot, 86 on horseback, 249 in canoes or boats, and 1,180 by ship. Money was nothing to Selwyn. When he was a curate, he gave up a stipend of 2150 a year to relieve his
parish of a debt. As a Bishop, whether he had £400, as in New Zealand, or ten times that sum in Lichfield, he gave right and left. Then look at his work. It is literally true, as the present number of Pacific sees shows, that he did the work of six bishops To him New Zealand owes in very large measure its schools, hospitals and colleges, as well as churches. To Selwyn the disendowment of the Irish Church was "spoliation," and yet what fear would there be of a disendowed Church that had an abundant supply of Selwyns ? Perhaps nothing in Mr. Tucker's painfully unsatisfactory book shows us Selwyn in a better light than this, which may be otherwise of interest :—
" The last resource now seems to be to assert the spiritual existence of the sees, their indestructibility by any power of the State ; to draw a clear distinction between the temporalities of the bishoprics which the State can handle, whether rightfully or not, and their divine and perpetual character, which is as impalpable to the grosser touch of the civil ruler as the soul of man is exempt from the power of the gaoler who may confine his body, or the hangman who may put an end to its life. Let the State be, if it pleases, the gaoler or the hang- man of the body of the Church ; let it suspend or alienate its revenues at pleasure, provided always that the soul of the Church, its living principle, its scripless and purseless spirit, its divine origin, its holy and inward energy, be not confounded with such beggarly elements, as seats in the House of Lords, and thousands a year, and parks and palaces, things which statesmen 'love to touch, and taste, and handle ; but which perish in the using: The want of this distinction caused the destruction of ten bishoprics in Ireland. If the same dis- tinction had not been drawn, the greater part of the canonries would have been destroyed with the confiscation of their revenues, instead of being held, as now, by preachers of the first eminence in the diocese, whose periodical cycles of preaching in the Cathedral Church will impart as much life and energy to the central heart, by their experi- mental eloquence and nnbought service, as the canons of the old school deadened and destroyed, by the worn-oat prose and heartless dullness of their hireling ministrations."
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