In turning, then, to your first question, I have to premise that the life and progress of any institution are very largely affected by attendant circumstances and surroundings for which perhaps the leaders of the institution itself are not responsible. Thus, with reference to our Provincial Church at the period you mention, she was weakened by the loss of not a few of those upon whom she had leaned for counsel and stimulating influence. Bishops Hobhouse and Abraham, Sir William Martin and Mr. Swainson, besides other prominent churchmen, such as Sir George Arney, and others less known, speedily followed their great leader, Bishop Selwyn, to England, or were removed by other causes. Without any surrender to the weakness of a mere _laudator temporis acti_, I look back to the time of my arrival in New Zealand with a feeling that there were giants in the earth in those days. Many whom we have more recently lost were also with us then--men like Messrs. Acland and Hanmer and Maude and Sewell, Col. Haultain, Mr. Hunter-Brown, and, of course, Bishop Hadfield and Dean Jacobs. Many of these were men of marked ability, men who made the synod halls ring with their forcible utterances, men full of knowledge of the Church and love for her, full of self-sacrificing spirit and determination to make her a praise in the faithful guardian of our Church's influence, Primate Harper. The loss of such fathers of the Church has been felt in the interval under review, and could not but affect the life and progress of the Church. It is not for me to say anything of those by whom their places have been filled. Another adverse circumstance which must be called to mind in such a review is the long period of commercial depression which followed a short period of fictitious prosperity and inflated values. Misled by the apparently fair prospect of making money rapidly--of which prospect a shoal of interested persons sprang up to make the most--undertakings were entered upon on borrowed capital and properties were bought at prices which could not be realised upon them perhaps twenty years afterwards. The consequence of all this was a widespread desolation. My diocesan visitations were in those days largely made on horseback, and in a journey of perhaps many hundred miles I had to look upon stations and homesteads at which I had formerly been hospitably received, whether their owners belonged to our communion or not, either closed altogether or left in charge of a shepherd.