In his last sermon he spoke of work amongst the heathen. “There, too, above all things, there was need for unity, ‘a real and visible unity’; no inward and spiritual unity can act as an outward evidence: the keen sighted native convert soon detects a difference of system.... We make a rule never to introduce controversy among a native people, or to impair the simplicity of their faith. If the fairest openings for missionary effort lie before us, if the ground has been pre-occupied by any other religious body, we forbear to enter. And I can speak with confidence upon this point from observation ranging over nearly one-half of the Southern Pacific Ocean, that wherever this law of religious unity is adopted, there the Gospel has its full and unchecked and undivided power. Nature itself has so divided our Mission Field that each labourer may work without interference with his neighbour. Each island circled with its own coral reef, is a field in which each missionary may carry out his own system with native teachers trained under his own eye.... Many of these islands I visited in their days of darkness, and therefore I can rejoice in the light that now bursts upon them, from whatever quarter it may come. I feel that there is an episcopate of love, as well as of authority ... above all things it is our duty to guard against inflicting upon them the curse of our disunion, lest we make every little island in the ocean a counterpart of our own divided and contentious Church. And further I would point to the Mission Field as the great outlet for the excited and sensitive spirit of the Church at home. There are minds, by nature intolerant of rule, in whom not even the spirit of the Gospel can implant an acquiescence in anything which they believe to be an error.... Such men would be the very salt of the earth, if they would but go out into the Mission Field.... They would find satisfaction for their zeal in its free and unbounded range ... the work itself will humble them ... will correct its own errors.... Is it then a hope too unreasonable to be entertained that the power which will heal the divisions of the Church at home, may come from her distant fields of missionary work?... Let it be no longer a reproach to the universities that they have sent so few missionaries to the heathen.” These four sermons are a revelation of Selwyn’s inmost mind, whilst they have a special interest of their own as throwing light on the condition of the Church both at home and overseas in the middle of the nineteenth century. They reveal his deepest thoughts on the questions which the experiences of his own varied life had brought to him, as he dwelt on them during his long voyages and his many journeys on horse and foot through the wilds of New Zealand. They show us what the man had become, what life had taught him; they tell of his hopes for his Church and its work throughout the world.