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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 77

Conclusion

page 60

Conclusion.

I have ventured to trespass at this length upon your patience and attention because you are the people to know all that is in my mind; hopes, fears, conclusions; and because, while consistently ignoring gossip, curtailed or incorrect newspaper reports or verbal accounts of one's sayings and doings, and the like, one has always felt that the Churchmen of the Diocese had a right to know, in a manner that might be regarded as authoritative, what one really did intend and what thoughts were in one's mind. I have honestly tried to tell you everything that I think you have a right to know.

After I had prepared the outlines of this Charge, I read again, after an interval of many years, Tucker's "Life of George Augustus Selwyn." Thank God! for much of what I have laid before you I can claim the support of that great man and Empire-builder. Conditions in 1903 are better for working on the lines of G. A. Selwyn's ideals than they were from 1841 to 1868. Though the conditions will always be changing, the ideals will ever be the same.

There is a famous phrase of Aristotle which the late Cecil Rhodes confessed had a profound influence upon his life:—"The conscious pursuit of a great purpose:' We are in earnest, to a large extent, over the "purpose"; but I cannot help thinking we are not nearly sufficiently "conscious," nor imagine how "great" the "purpose" is.

I have tried to be constructive and not merely critical, positive not negative. Some may think the time premature for speaking of many of the things I have spoken upon. But, right or wrong, I cannot help it. I am neither a Selwyn nor a Cowie. You have sent for me. Well, you have to take me as I am—a man who has had to fight his way to his own faith, and who believes in it because it cost so much to get; a man who intensely believes in the Mission of the English Church; a man who will never try to upset another man's form of expression of Christian belief, and who positively refuses the right of anyone to interfere with his own expression thereof; a man who is not afraid of hard, work, but who does, and prays he always will, page 61 "dream dreams and see visions." Unless you are an idealist you never can be useful as a practical man.

I have put big schemes before you. Now or never is the time for you to join in launching them as carefully planned vessels full of cargo for the Honour of God and the welfare of this people. They are:—
  • A Cathedral idea, not only a building, consisting of live men round a central altar.
  • Gradually, do away with weak centres and make strong ones in the way of Brotherhoods or bands of Mission Clergy.
  • Increase the number of Clergy, European and Native, in the Diocese.
  • Wait until you see how the "Bible in Schools" movement works out before doing anything else.
  • Aim at £5,000 within three years and give the best Religious and Scholarly Education, in a Diocesan High School for Girls, that can be offered anywhere.
  • Build up a Sustentation Fund. We cannot get on without it.
  • Bravely face the Maori Mission: it is within our powers, it is our glad responsibility.
  • Help to form a Church Public Opinion, big, loving, great in spirtual force.

Remember, the Catholic Faith is the foundation of Empire. Keep the structure sound.

When Heine was looking at the Cathedral at Amiens, it is said that he remarked to his friend:—"Convictions can build cathedrals, opinions cannot." It is true. Convictions alone can give what we want in this Diocese. Convictions will give us Clergy, Sustentation Fund, the Girls' High School, everything.

Two things impress a man coming from Home to this Colony: the bigness and the littleness of it all. They are not contradictory. They are the obverse and reverse of the Imperial medal.

The man who has never left England has as limited an idea of the bigness of the English Church as the man, who has never lived among millions of people, is unaware of the exceeding smallness of his own vision. Bigness! Why, it is something not capable of realization without seeing. There is a romance, a splendour, a page 62 courage, a faith, about Colonial Churchmanship that the Home Churchman has no conception of. Littleness! It is so mean, sordid, paltry, unworthy; so un-English sometimes in its miserable pettiness and lack of honour.

Romance and sordid fact, poetry and dull prose, idealism and the cheapest sort of materialism, real honour and unutterable meanness, solid Christian fellowship among all Christians and positively un-understandable jealousy and "sheep stealing"; those are the sort of impressions left upon one's mind. One tries all one knows to hold on to the big and the bright in it all.

And oh! it is a bit of work any true man ought to thank God on his knees for being allowed to share in. To follow Tradition needs but little individuality. To make Tradition, of the highest and best kind, is a work that is worthy of strong men, of men who believe in their God, and therefore are able wisely to believe in themselves.

Gentlemen, the Call is Divine, the Call is Imperial. The response can only be evidenced, in human terms, by the prayerful, honest, upright, pure, daily Christian conduct of men who have got the supreme conviction that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by even-word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"; by men who believe that the destiny of mankind is rightly expressed in the words of the Collect for to-day: man is meant to be "an holy temple acceptable unto Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

[Note.—The writing of this Charge was, by undesigned coincidence, completed on October 17, 1903, the (52nd Anniversary of the Consecration of George Augustus Selwyn, first Bishop of New Zealand.]