While he embraced large and comprehensive projects, it was one of his striking peculiarities that he paid close attention to minute details. Some minds beginning with the vast and theoretical, work backwards into the necessary details; others setting out upon that which is minute and practical, from the necessities of the hour and the duties of the day before them seem to enlarge their circle and to build up new projects as they proceed. The former may be men of greater genius, but the latter are in general the more successful, and to these Mr. Marsden belonged. The cast of his mind was eminently practical. No crude visions of distant triumphs led him away from the duties which belonged to the scene and circumstances in which providence had placed him. Paramatta was for many years the model parish of New South Wales, although its pastor was the soul of the New Zealand mission, and of many a philanthropic enterprise besides. Commissioner Biggs, in his "Report of Inquiry," which was published by order of the House of Commons, observes that "Mr. Marsden, though much occupied by the business of the missions which he conducted, and by the superintendence of the orphan school which he had himself called into existence, was remarkably attentive to the duties of his ministry." "The congregation at Paramatta appeared to me to be more respectable than at the other places of worship, and the choral parts of the service were admirably performed by the singers, who have been taught under the direction of the Rev. S. Marsden." He was well known to all his parishioners, to whom he paid constant ministerial visits; his attention to the sick, whether at their own homes or the government hospital, was unremitting, and here his natural shrewdness, sharpened as it was by his spiritual penetration, showed itself in his insight into the true character of those he dealt with. Nothing disgusted him more than a want of reality. High professions from inconsistent lips were loathsome to him, and his rebukes were sometimes sharp. A gentleman, whose habits of life were not altogether consistent with Christian simplicity and deadness to the world, had been reading "Mammon," when that volume had just made its appearance, and with that partial eye with which we are too apt to view our own failings, had come to the flattering conclusion that by contrast with the monster depicted in "Mammon," the desires he felt to add field to field and house to house, were not covetousness, but that diligence in business which the Scriptures inculcate. In the happy excitement of the discovery, he exultingly exclaimed, "Well, thank God, I have no covetousness." Mr. Marsden, who had read no more about covetousness than he found in the Bible, had sat silent; rising from his chair, and taking his hat, he merely said, "Well, I think it is time for me to go: and so, sir, you thank God that you are not as other men are. You have no covetousness?