would look back to the establishment of a Christian empire in New Zealand as the greatest achievement of the first part of the nineteenth century. [4] This account is taken from the _Nelson Church Messenger_, of some years ago. Bishop Williams thinks the surveyor must have been misled to some extent. Second Period. CHAPTER VIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NEW ORDER. (1839-1842). Replenish the earth, and subdue it. --_Genesis._ The missionaries had worked wonders in New Zealand, but the very success of their work proved to be its undoing. Now that the islands were safe and quiet, they attracted a rush of white settlers who were eager for land and gain. Instead of whalers and flax traders, whose settlements were only temporary, there appeared farmers and artisans who had fled from the misery of the mother country to found for themselves permanent homes in the "Britain of the South." Many of the immigrants came singly from Australia, but from the year 1839 the New Zealand Company sent thousands of settlers in more or less organised fashion to the country on either side of Cook Strait, to Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth. This company was founded by the celebrated Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a man who had read and thought much upon the subject of colonisation. His views reflected fairly the public sentiment of the day. The colonists should be grouped in communities for mutual help and safety; they should have churches and clergy and as much religion as sensible men required at home; the rights of the dark-skinned inhabitants of the soil should not be altogether ignored, but neither should they be allowed to stand in the way of progress and expansion. The world was made for the Englishman: if the Maori came between them, so much the worse for him.