Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales; and of His Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and TahitiMarsden, Samuel
Religion
Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, of Paramatta, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales; and of His Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti
Marsden, Samuel
Marsden, Samuel, 1765-1838; Missions -- French Polynesia -- Tahiti (Island); Missions -- New Zealand; Māori (New Zealand people)
reading prayers, and the other preaching an admirable sermon to his own
native tribe." Other churches have similar triumphs. The Wesleyans have
three native assistant ministers, and probably these are not all, for it
may be presumed that a great work is going forward in so large an
island, of which our missionary societies have no official reports, and
by agents who are no longer responsible to them. Thus it is often found
that in the interior some village or hamlet has become Christian where
no European missionary was ever seen. Native converts have done their
own work.
Still the church in New Zealand is in an infant state, surrounded by
many dangers. The influx of Europeans, the sudden increase of wealth and
luxury, the introduction of a new and foreign literature from England,
bearing as it were upon its wings all that is bad as well as all that is
lovely and of good report in theology, politics, and morals, may well
cause, as indeed it does create, the deepest concern to those who have
at heart the purity of the Maori faith, and the continued progress of
the gospel. It is not for those who know that the gospel is the power of
God unto salvation, to doubt for a moment of its ultimate success; but
the firmest faith may, at the same time, be apprehensive and anxious, if
not alarmed, for the fiery trial that awaits her,--not of persecution,
but of wealth and luxury, and the sad example of every European vice.
Let the reader help them with his prayers.
We cannot close our sketch of the progress of Christianity in New
Zealand, without some allusion to the Canterbury Association, one of the
most remarkable attempts of modern times to colonize on Christian
principles, or rather perhaps we should say, to carry abroad the old
institutions of England, and plant them as it were full blown in a new
country. The design was not altogether original, for the New England
puritans of the seventeenth century, had led the way, in their attempts
to colonize at Boston and in New England, in the days of Charles I. They
would have carried out the principles, and worship of the Brownites to
the exclusion of other sects, though happily for the freedom of
religion, their design was soon found to be impracticable, and was only
partially accomplished. The Canterbury Association was formed on high
church of England principles, "avowedly for the purpose of founding a
settlement, to be composed in the first instance of members of that
church, or at least of those who did not object to its principles." Its
early friends now admit that their project was, in some of its parts,
utopian and impracticable. The idea, if ever seriously entertained, of
excluding by a test of church membership those whose profession differed
from their own was abandoned by most of the colonists as soon as they
had set foot on the shores of New Zealand. In 1848, Otakou or Otago, in
the southern part of the Middle Island, was colonized by an association
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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