Books: Life of John Coleridge Patteson

C >> Charlotte M. Yonge >> Life of John Coleridge Patteson

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'And now one word about myself, which at such a time I should not
obtrude upon you, but that the visit of the Bishop of New Zealand
made it necessary for me to speak.

'I am going with him to work, if all is well, at the Antipodes,
believing that the growing desire for missionary work, which for
years has been striving within me, ought no longer to be resisted,
and trusting that I am not mistaken in supposing that this is the
line of duty that God has marked out for me.

'You may be sure that all this is done with the full consent and
approbation of my dear Father. He and the Bishop had a great deal of
conversation about it, and I left it entirely for them to determine.
That it will be a great trial to us all at Christmas when we sail, I
cannot conceal from myself; it is so great a separation that I cannot
expect ever to see my dear Father, perhaps not any of those I love
best, again in this world. But if you all know that I am doing, or
trying to do, what is right, you will all be happy about me; and what
has just been taking place at the Manor House teaches us to look, on
a little to a blessed meeting in a better place soon. It is from no
dissatisfaction at my present position, that I am induced to take
this step. I have been very happy at Alfington; and I hope to be
ordained Priest, on the 24th of September, with a calm mind. I trust
I am not following any sudden hasty impulse, but obeying a real call
to a real work, and (in the midst of much self-seeking and other
alloy) not wholly without a sincere desire to labour for the honour
and glory of God.'

With this purpose full in view, Coleridge Patteson received
Ordination as a Priest in the ensuing Ember Week, again at the hands
of Bishop Phillpotts, in Exeter Cathedral; where a beautiful marble
pulpit is to commemorate the fact.

The wrench from home and friends could not but be terrible. The
sisters, indeed, were so far prepared that they had been aware from
the first of his wish and his mother's reception of it, and when they
told their Father, he was pleased and comforted; for truly he was
upheld by the strength of willing sacrifice. Those were likewise
sustained who felt the spirit of missionary enterprise and sympathy,
which was at that time so strongly infused into the Church; but the
shock was severe to many, and especially to the brother who had been
devoted to Coley from their earliest infancy, and among his relations
the grief was great.

As to the district of Alfington, the distress was extreme. The
people had viewed Mr. Patteson as their exclusive property, and could
not forgive the Bishop of New Zealand for, as they imagined, tempting
him away. 'Ah! Sir,' was the schoolmistress's answer to some warm
words from Mr. Justice Coleridge in praise of Bishop Selwyn, 'he may
be--no doubt he is--a very good man. I only wish he had kept his
hands off Alfington.' 'It would not be easy,' says the parishioner
from whom I have already quoted, 'to describe the intense sorrow in
view of separation. Mr. Patteson did all he could to assure us that
it was his own will and act, consequent upon the conviction that it
was God's will that he should go, and to exonerate the Bishop, but
for some time he was regarded as the immediate cause of our loss; and
he never knew half the hard things said of him by the same people
who, when they heard he was coming, and would preach on the Sunday,
did their utmost to make themselves and their children look their
very best.'

Indeed, the affectionate writer seems to have shared the poor
people's feeling that they had thus festally received a sort of
traitor with designs upon their pastor. She goes on to tell of his
ministrations to her mother, whose death-bed was the first he
attended as a Priest.

It would be impossible for me to say all he was to her. Not long
before her death, when he had just left the room, she said, 'I have
not felt any pain or weakness whilst Mr. Patteson has been here.' I
was not always present during his visits to her, and I think their
closer communings were only known to Him above, but their effects
were discernible in that deep confidence in him on her part, and that
lasting impression on him, for you will remember, in his letter last
April, he goes back in memory to that time, and calls it--'a solemn
scene in my early ministry.' Solemn, indeed, it was to us all that
last night of her life upon earth. He was with her from about the
middle of the day on Monday until about four o'clock on Tuesday
morning; when, after commending her soul to God, he closed her eyes
with his own hands, and taking out his watch, told us the hour and
moment of her departure. He then went home and apprised Miss Wilkins
of her death in these words: 'My soul fleeth unto the LORD before the
morning watch, I say before the morning watch,' and at the earliest
dawn of day, the villagers were made aware that she had passed away
by the tolling bell, and tolled by him. This was not the only death
during his ministry among us; but it was the first occasion where he
gave the Communion of the Sick, also when he read the Burial Service.
Cases of rejoicing with those that rejoiced as well as of weeping
with those that wept, the child and the aged seemed alike to
appreciate his goodness. In him were combined those qualities which
could inspire with deep reverence and entire confidence. Many, many
are or will be the stars in the crown of his rejoicing, and some owe
to him under God, their deeper work of grace in the heart and their
quickening in the divine life.'

A remarkable testimony is this to the impression remaining after the
lapse of sixteen years from a ministry extending over no more than
seventeen months. 'Our Mr. Patteson' the people called him to the
last.

Yet, in the face of all this grief, the parting till death, the work
broken off, the life cut short midway, the profusion of needs at home
for able ministers, is it to be regretted that Coleridge Patteson
devoted himself to the more remote fields abroad? I think we shall
find that his judgment was right. Alfington might love him dearly,
but the numbers were too small to afford full scope for his powers,
and he would have experienced the trials of cramped and unemployed
energies had he remained there beyond his apprenticeship. Nor were
his gifts, so far as can be judged, exactly those most requisite for
work in large towns. He could deal with individuals better than with
masses, and his metaphysical mind, coupled with the curious
difficulty he had in writing to an unrealised public, either in
sermons or reports, might have rendered him less effective than men
of less ability. He avoided, moreover, the temptations, pain, and
sting of the intellectual warfare within the bosom of the Church, and
served her cause more effectually on her borders than he could in her
home turmoils. His great and peculiar gifts of languages, seconded
by his capacity for navigation, enabled him to be the builder up of
the Melanesian Church in so remarkable a manner that one can hardly
suppose but that he was marked out for it, and these endowments would
have found no scope in an ordinary career. Above all, no man can
safely refuse the call to obey the higher leadings of grace. If he
deny them, he will probably fall below that which he was before, and
lose 'even that which he seemeth to have.'

A few days later, he wrote to his cousin Arthur Coleridge an
expression of his feelings regarding the step he had taken in the
midst of the pain it was costing to others:--

'Feniton: November 11, 9 A.M.

'My dear Arthur,--Your letter was very acceptable because I am, I
confess, in that state of mind occasionally when the assurance of my
being right, coming from another, tends to strengthen my own
conviction.

'I do not really doubt as I believe; and yet, knowing my want of
consideration for others, and many other thoughts which naturally
prevent my exercising a clear sound judgment on a matter affecting
myself, I sometimes (when I have had a conversation, it throws me
back upon analysing my own conduct) feel inclined to go over the
whole process again, and that is somewhat trying.

'On the other hand, I am almost strangely free from excitement. I
live on exactly as I did before: and even when alone with Father,
talk just as I used to talk, have nothing more to tell him, not
knowing how to make a better use of these last quiet evenings.

'By-and-by I shall wish I had done otherwise, perhaps, but I do not
know now, that I have anything specially requiring our consideration:
we talk about family matters, the movements in the theological and
political world, &c., very little about ourselves.

'One of all others I delight to think of for the music's sake, and
far more for the glorious thought that it conveys. "Then shall the
righteous," not indeed that I dare apply it to myself (as you know),
but it helps one on, teaches what we may be, what our two dear
parents are, and somehow the intervening, space becomes smaller as
the eye is fixed steadily on the glory beyond.

'God bless you, my dear fellow.

'Ever your affectionate

'J. C. P.'

The Mission party intended to sail immediately after Christmas in the
'Southern Cross,' the schooner which was being built at Blackwall for
voyages among the Melanesian isles. In expectation of this, Patteson
went up to London in the beginning of December, when the admirable
crayon likeness was taken by Mr. Richmond, an engraving from which is
here given. He then took his last leave of his uncle, and of the
cousins who had been so dear to him ever since the old days of daily
meeting in childhood; and Miss Neill, then a permanent invalid, notes
down: 'On December 13, I had the happiness of receiving the Holy
Communion from dear Coley Patteson, and the following morning I
parted from him, as I fear, for ever. God bless and prosper him, and
guard him in all the dangers he will encounter!' He wrote thus soon
after his return:--

'Feniton: December 22, 1854.

'My dear Miss Neill,--I began a note to you a day or two ago, but I
could not go on with it, for I have had so very much to do in church
and out of it, parochializing, writing sermons, &c. It makes some
little difference in point of time whether I am living here or at
Alfington, and so the walking about from one house to another is not
so convenient for writing letters as for thinking over sermons.

'I need not tell you what a real happiness and comfort it is to me to
have been with you again and to have talked so long with you, and
most of all to have received the Communion with you. It is a blessed
thought that no interval of space or time can interrupt that
Communion of the Spirit, and that we are one in Him, though working
in different corners of the Lord's field.

'I want to look you out a little book or two; and Fanny has told you
that if ever my picture is photographed, I have particularly desired
them to send you a copy with my love. Your cross I have now round my
neck, and I shall always wear it; it will hang there with a locket
containing locks of hair of my dear Father and Mother, the girls, and
Jem.

'You will be glad to hear that they all seem cheerful and hearty.
Fan is not well, but I do not see that she is depressed or unhappy.
In fact, the terrible events of the war prove a lesson to all, and
they feel, I suppose, that it might be far worse, and that so long as
I am doing my duty, there is no cause for sorrow.

'Still there will be seasons of loneliness and sadness, and it seems
to me as if it always was so in the case of all the people of whom we
read in the Bible. Our Lord distinctly taught His disciples to
expect it to be so, and even experienced this sorrow of heart
Himself, filling up the full measure of His cup of bitterness. So I
don't learn that I ought exactly to wish it to be otherwise, so much
is said in the Bible about being made partaker of His, sufferings,
only I pray that it may please God to bear me up in the midst of it.
I must repeat that your example is constantly before me, as a witness
to the power that God gives of enduring pain and sickness. It is
indeed, and great comfort it gives me. He is not indeed keeping you
still in the world without giving you a work to do, and enabling you
from your bed of sickness to influence strongly a circle of friends.

'God bless you for all your kindness to me, and watchfulness over me
as a child, for your daily thought of me and prayers for me, and may
He grant that I may wear your precious gift not only on but in my
heart.

'Always your very affectionate

'J. C. PATTESON.

'P.S.--I do not expect to sail for three weeks; this morning I had a
line about the ship, and they say that she cannot be ready for a
fortnight.'

On Christmas-day, he was presented with a Bible subscribed for by the
whole Alfington population. Here is a sentence from his letter of
acknowledgment:--

'If these poor needy souls can, from love to a fellow creature whom
they have known but a few months, deny themselves their very crumb of
bread to show their affection, what should be our conduct to Him from
whom we have received all things, and to whom we owe our life,
strength, and all that we possess?'

The farewell service was said by one of these poor old people to be
like a great funeral. Sexagesima Sunday was Sir John's sixty-sixth
birthday, and it was spent in expectation that it would be the last
of the whole party at home, for on the Monday Sir John was obliged to
go to London for a meeting of the Judicial Committee. The two notes
his son wrote during his absence are, perhaps to prove good spirits,
full of the delights of skating, which were afforded by the
exceptionally severe frost of February 1855, which came opportunely
to regale with this favourite pastime one who would never tread on
solid ice again. He wrote with zest of the large merry party of
cousins skating together, of the dismay of the old housekeeper when
he skimmed her in a chair over the ice, sighing out, in her terror,
'My dear man, don't ye go so fast,' with all manner of endearing
expressions--of the little boys to whom he threw nuts to be scrambled
for, and of his own plunge through the thinner ice, when, regardless
of drenched garments, he went on with the sport to the last, and came
home with clothes frozen as stiff as a board.

He was not gone when his father and brother came home on the twenty-
sixth, prepared to go with him to Southampton.

The note to his cousin Arthur written at this time thus ends: 'We
worked together once at Dresden. Whatever we have acquired in the
way of accomplishments, languages, love of art and music, everything
brings us into contact with somebody, and gives us the power of
influencing them for good, and all to the glory of God.'

Many were touched when, on the first Sunday in Lent, as Sir John
Patteson was wont to assist in Church by reading the Lessons, it fell
to him to pronounce the blessing of God upon the patriarch for his
willing surrender of his son.

After all, the 'Southern Cross' was detected in leaking again, and as
she was so small that the Mission party would have been most
inconveniently crowded for so long a voyage, the Bishop was at length
persuaded to relinquish his intention of sailing in her, and passages
were taken for himself, Mrs. Selwyn, Mr. Patteson, and another
clergyman, in the 'Duke of Portland,' which did not sail till the end
of March, when Patteson was to meet her at Gravesend.

Thus he did not depart till the 25th. 'I leave home this morning I
may say, for it has struck midnight,' he wrote to Miss Neill. 'I
bear with me to the world's end your cross, and the memory of one who
is bearing with great and long-tried patience the cross that God has
laid upon her.'

He chose to walk to the coach that would take him to join the railway
at Cullompton. The last kisses were exchanged at the door, and the
sisters watched him out of sight, then saw that their father was not
standing with them. They consulted for a moment, and then one of
them silently looked into his sitting room, and saw him with his
little Bible, and their hearts were comforted concerning him. After
that family prayers were never read without a clause for
Missionaries, 'especially the absent member of this family.'

He went up to his brother's chambers in London, whence a note was
sent home the next day to his father:--

'I write one line to-night to tell you that I am, thank God, calm and
even cheerful. I stayed a few minutes in the churchyard after I left
you, picked a few primrose buds from dear mamma's grave, and then
walked on.

'At intervals I felt a return of strong violent emotion, but I soon
became calm; I read most of the way up, and felt surprised that I
could master my own feelings so much.

'How much I owe to the cheerful calm composure which you all showed
this morning! I know it must have cost you all a great effort. It
spared me a great one.'

On the 27th the brothers went on board the 'Duke of Portland,' and
surveyed the cabins, looking in at the wild scene of confusion sure
to be presented by an emigrant ship on the last day in harbour. A
long letter, with a minute description of the ship and the
arrangements ends with: 'I have every blessing and comfort. Not one
is wanting. I am not in any excitement, I think, certainly I do not
believe myself to be in such a state as to involve a reaction of
feeling. Of course if I am seedy at sea for a few days I shall feel
low-spirited also most likely, and miss you all more in consequence.
But that does not go below the surface. Beneath is calm tranquil
peace of mind.'

On the 28th the two brothers joined the large number of friends who
went down with the Mission party, among them Mr. Edward Coleridge.

Parting notes were written from on board to all the most beloved; to
little Paulina, of bright hopes, to Miss Neill of her cross; to
Arthur the German greeting, 'Lebe wohl, doch nicht auf Ewigkeit,'--to
Mr. Justice Coleridge:--

'March 28, 1855.

'My dear Uncle,--One line more to thank you for all your love and to
pray for the blessing of God upon you and yours now and for ever.

'We sail to-day. Such letters from home, full of calm, patient,
cheerful resignation to his will. Wonderfully has God supported us
through this trial. My kind love to Arthur. Always, my dear Uncle,
Your affectionate, grateful Nephew,

'JOHN COLERIDGE PATTESON.'

Perhaps the frame of mind in which Coley left England can best be
gathered from the following extract from a letter to his father from
his uncle Edward:--

'While on board I had a good deal of quiet talk with him, and was
fully confirmed by his manner and words, of that which I did not
doubt before, that the surrender of self, which he has made, has been
put into his heart by God's Holy Spirit, and that all his impulses
for good are based on the firm foundation of trust in God, and a due
appreciation of his mortal, as well as professional condition. I
never saw a hand set on the plough stead with more firmness, yet
entire modesty, or with an eye and heart less turned backwards on the
world behind. I know you do not in any way repine at what you have
allowed him to do; and I feel sure that ere long you will see cause
to bless God not only for having given you such a son, but also for
having put it into his heart so to devote himself to that particular
work in the Great Vineyard.'

About 5 P.M. the 'Duke of Portland' swung round with the tide,
strangers were ordered on shore, Coleridge and James Patteson said
their last farewells, and while the younger brother went home by the
night-train to carry the final greetings to his father and sisters,
the ship weighed anchor and the voyage was begun.

CHAPTER VI.

THE VOYAGE AND FIRST YEAR. 1855-1856.

When the See of New Zealand was first formed, Archbishop Howley
committed to the care of the first Bishop the multitudinous islands
scattered in the South Pacific. The technical bounds of the diocese
were not defined; but matters were to a certain degree simplified by
Bishop Selwyn's resolution only to deal with totally heathen isles,
and whatever superiority the authorised chief pastor might rightfully
claim, not to confuse the minds of the heathen by the sight of
variations among Christians, and thus never to preach in any place
already occupied by Missions, a resolution from which he only once
departed, in the case of a group apparently relinquished by its first
teachers. This cut off all the properly called Polynesian isles,
whose inhabitants are of the Malay type, and had been the objects of
care to the London Mission, ever since the time of John Williams;
also the Fiji Islands; and a few which had been taken in hand by a
Scottish Presbyterian Mission; but the groups which seem to form the
third fringe round the north-eastern curve of Australia, the New
Hebrides, Banks Islands, and Solomon Isles, were almost entirely open
ground, with their population called Melanesian or Black Islanders,
from their having much of the Negro in their composition and
complexion. These were regarded as less quick but more steady than
the Polynesian race, with somewhat the same difference of character
as there is between the Teuton and the Kelt. The reputation of
cannibalism hung about many of the islands, and there was no doubt of
boats' crews having been lost among them, but in most cases there had
been outrage to provoke reprisals.

These islands had as yet been little visited, except by Captain Cook,
their first discoverer, and isolated Spanish exploring expeditions;
but of late whalers and sandal wood traders, both English and
American, had been finding their way among them, and too often acting
as irresponsible adventurous men of a low class are apt to do towards
those whom they regard as an inferior race.

Mission work had hardly reached this region. It was in attempting it
that John Williams had met his death at Erromango, one of the New
Hebrides; but one of his best institutions had been a school in one
of the Samoan or Navigators' Islands, in which were educated young
men of the native races to be sent to the isles to prepare the way
for white men. Very nobly had these Samoan pupils carried out his
intentions, braving dislike, disease and death in the islands to
which they were appointed, and having the more to endure because they
came without the prestige of a white man. Moreover, the language was
no easier to them than to him, as their native speech is entirely
different from the Melanesian; which is besides broken into such an
extraordinary number of different dialects, varying from one village
to another in an island not twenty miles long, that a missionary
declared that the people must have come straight from the Tower of
Babel, and gone on dividing their speech ever since. Just at the
time of the formation of the See of New Zealand, the excitement
caused at home by Williams's death had subsided, and the London
Mission's funds were at so low an ebb that, so far from extending
their work, they had been obliged to let some of it fall into
abeyance.

All this came to the knowledge of the Bishop of New Zealand while he
was occupied with the cares of his first seven years in his more
immediate diocese, and in 1848, he made a voyage of inspection in
H.M.S. 'Dido.' He then perceived that to attempt the conversion of
this host of isles of tropical climate through a resident English
clergyman in each, would be impossible, besides which he knew that no
Church takes root without native clergy, and he therefore intended
bringing boys to New Zealand, and there educating them to become
teachers to their countrymen. He had lately established, near
Auckland, for the sons of the colonists, St. John's College, which in
1850 was placed under the Reverend Charles John Abraham, the former
Eton master, who had joined the Bishop to act as Archdeacon and
assist in the scheme of education; and here it was planned that the
young Melanesians should be trained.

The Bishop possessed a little schooner of twenty-two tons, the
'Undine,' in which he was accustomed to make his expeditions along
the coast; and in August 1849, he set forth in her, with a crew of
four, without a weapon of any sort, to 'launch out into the deep, and
let down his nets for a draught.' Captain Erskine of H.M.S.
'Havannah' readily undertook to afford him any assistance
practicable, and they were to cruise in company, the 'Undine' serving
as a pilot boat or tender on coasts where the only guide was 'a few
rough sketches collected from small trading vessels.'

They met near Tanna, but not before the Bishop had been in Dillon's
Bay, on the island of Erromango, the scene of Williams's murder, and
had allowed some of the natives to come on board his vessel as a
first step towards friendly intercourse. The plan agreed on by the
Bishop and the Captain was to go as far north as Vate, and return by
way of the Loyalty Isles, which fringe the east coast of New
Caledonia, to touch at that large island, and then visit the Island
of Pines, at its extreme south point, and there enquire into a
massacre said to have taken place. This was effected, and in each
place the natives showed themselves friendly. From New Caledonia the
Bishop brought away a pupil named Dallup, and at two of the Loyalty
Islands, Nengone or Mare, and Lifu, where Samoan teachers had excited
a great desire for farther instruction, boys eagerly begged to go
with him, and two were taken from each, in especial Siapo, a young
Nengone chief eighteen or nineteen years old, of very pleasing
aspect, and with those dignified princely manners which rank is
almost sure to give. The first thing done with such lads when they
came on board was to make clothes for them, and when they saw the
needle employed in their service, they were almost sure to beg to be
taught the art, and most of them soon became wonderfully dexterous in
it.