On his return to Auckland Selwyn at once founded a Branch of the new Board of Missions, thus making the New Zealand Church from the first recognize its missionary responsibilities; his ambition was to make his diocese the great missionary centre of the Southern Ocean. The carrying out of his many schemes had been made easier for him by the arrival this year of his friend, Mr. Abraham, with his wife. Abraham had at last found himself free to leave Eton and now came to be head of St. John’s College at Auckland. With him came Mr. Lloyd, another helper, and their arrival and the hopes thus given of further development so encouraged Selwyn that he was wont to call this year, 1850, his _Annus Mirabilis_. The sight of what Selwyn had already accomplished made a deep impression upon Abraham, which finds expression in a letter home from Mrs. Abraham. “What do we find in him? All that he was; all that we believed.... You can feel the deep joy it is to feel this day by day pressed home to one’s conviction ... to find that it was not any mere fancy, any imaginary greatness or goodness, with which memory and friendship had invested him in absence, but that he was in his simple unvarnished reality, more than all he (Mr. Abraham) had thought and trusted to and reverenced for these nine years past—the entire renunciation of self and all belonging to him in comparison with the duty and the object of the present moment is so shown forth in his daily life, so transparently open to all who have eyes to see and hearts to receive the witness of such an example, that one must be dead and dull indeed not to feel continually the all-pervading power of such a life.... One feels that he is the one man to pioneer the way and lay foundations.... My husband owns that he cannot gainsay or resist the wisdom with which he speaks, though he is thankful to find the Judge quite joins with him in his feeling that a drag-chain rather than a spur is needed on his favourite Melanesian Mission; and is disposed to watch his widening schemes in that direction with a zealous regard for this country, which must after all be the real battlefield in behalf of the coloured race, and also with anxiety for the personal health and safety of the Bishop himself, which they all feel is certainly risked in each one of these voyages.... I do not wonder at the hold these islands have upon him, after hearing his stories of his intercourse with them, and especially about the boys he had here last summer.”