"If the organisation of the New Zealand Church had been a little more advanced towards completion, I should gladly have availed myself of the consent already obtained to the appointment of the Venerable Archdeacon Abraham to succeed me in the See of Auckland; the archdeaconries of Wellington, Waiapu, and Tauranga being, as it is proposed, erected into bishoprics, and placed under the episcopal care of the present Archdeacons Hadfield, W. Williams, and Brown. Knowing the difficulties which are thought to stand in the way of the creation of missionary bishoprics, I should then have gladly undertaken the charge of Melanesia as my own diocese, retaining only such an interest in New Zealand as might connect me still with the councils of its Church, and give me a central home and resting-place among my own countrymen." The boldness and grandeur of this scheme have hardly been sufficiently realised. An ecclesiastical province divided into small dioceses, with missionaries at their head, and its primate spending his time in the foreign mission field: what an object lesson to the whole Church New Zealand would have presented! CHAPTER XII. ORGANISATION AND PROGRESS. (1850-1859). The inward life must not be separated in practice from the external unity of the body of Christ. The law of unity is the essence of its strength, its purity, and its holiness. --_Bishop Selwyn._ "The urgent necessity of mutual communion for preservation of our unity ... maketh it requisite that the Church of God here on earth have her _laws_." So wrote the judicious Hooker in that immortal work which came to Bishop Selwyn as a legacy from his great predecessor, Samuel Marsden. The bishop himself was well aware of this necessity. We have seen how he tried to bind the missionaries to himself by calling them together in synods in 1844 and in 1847. The canons which were passed by these gatherings were doubtless of some importance, but their chief value lay in the spirit of _unity_ which they were calculated to evoke.