He wrote thus on seeing the printed prospectus of the Settlement. It had filled his mind with anxiety because of his intense love for New Zealand and his eager desire for anything that might benefit the Church and the country. But when the Canterbury pilgrims began to arrive, he hastened to Lyttelton to greet them. As soon as the _Undine_ was seen to enter the harbour, two of the newly-arrived clergy hastened on board. One of them thus describes his visit: “Both wore cap and gown, at which the Bishop seemed pleased (one wonders whether it would not have been truer to say amused), they gazed around with awe and interest until the awe at least was dispelled by the cordial reception they met with, and the unequalled charm of the Bishop’s presence and conversation. The marvellous neatness of that diminutive cabin and the ingenuity of its arrangements, are never to be forgotten.... On the following Sunday the Bishop celebrated the Holy Communion in a loft over a good’s store, reached by a ladder, the seats being extemporised by resting planks on sugar barrels.” The Bishop himself writes to a friend interested in the Settlement: “Here I am among the Canterbury pilgrims; and a very good set of colonists they are, as far as I can judge. But a great mistake has been made in sending out too many at once, and in allowing any consideration to prevent their instant occupation of land. They are not allowed to choose till two months after their arrival, by which time many will have become demoralized by idleness and desultory habits.... I repeat again and again the same advice: send out your parochial staff ready organized—clergymen, landowners, labourers, not turned adrift upon an interminable plain: far less cooped up in a Dutch oven at Lyttelton; but to go at once to a parish known and chosen by themselves, and to a church and school already built; so that not one single day’s delay may occur in resuming those good habits in their new country which they have learned in England. I find neither church, nor school, nor parsonage in existence. Money enough has been spent, but all in civil engineering. Last Sunday I administered the Holy Communion in a crowded loft over a store. I do not care for these things if they are unavoidable; but where it has been part of the plan from the first to put religion in its right place, I do object to spacious and costly offices, long lines of wharves, roads, piers, etc., and not one sixpence of expenditure in any form for the glory of God, or for the comfort of the clergy. I shall, of course, make the best of the matter.”