These words show what the organization of his diocese meant to him. He was planting a free and independent Church which was to endure, not doing a piece of individual mission work. Cherishing these wide plans for the future, he wanted helpers who could take his place when he had to be absent on his visitation journeys. “I have scarcely a person in the place,” he writes, “who has any eye for minute and careful arrangement, without which no barbarous people, I am sure, can ever be thoroughly Christianised. Throughout the whole mission the delusion has prevailed more or less, that the Gospel will give habits as well as teach principles. My conviction is that habits uncorrected will be the thorns which will choke the good seed ... to get that personal and parental care bestowed upon the native children which will qualify them to be hereafter Christian parents in every sense, is the difficulty which almost weighs me to the ground.” The smaller cares and the great visions of the future all had their place in his mind, but he could not help fearing what might be the effect on an over-detailed mind of the increasing serving of tables. He felt that he specially needed the help of his friend when “the very causes which most require earnestness in prayer made him unable to pray as he ought. “Expect nothing from us,” he wrote, “but bring with you as large a spiritual treasure as you can. Come to help rather than to be helped.” Two years later in 1849, when he at last heard that Mr. Abraham was able to come, he wrote to his close friend, Edward Coleridge, “My heart beats with joy at the prospect of Abraham coming. O what a blessing it will be to a mind not only beginning to be overwrought but beginning to be conscious of it.... Abraham will sustain part of the spiritual and intellectual strain which falls upon the head of such an institution as this.... If I could but feel that I was so growing in grace as to increase in fitness for the work as the work itself increases, I could then bound over the sea and over every New Zealand forest and mountain with the lightest of hearts and the most buoyant of hopes. But if the work should increase faster than the supply of inward strength, and if help should be withheld in the form in which it would be most welcome, by the subdivision of the diocese, it is not any bodily decay which I fear so much as that overmuch service may make my mind careful and troubled about many things, and unable even in old age, to sit in contemplation at the feet of Christ.” CHAPTER V THE CALL OF THE PACIFIC