includes some of the most respected names in the Free Church; and
thus, judged by all the ordinary tests, it seems to promise at least
as well as any other resembling field of enterprise open at the
present time. But respecting the principles involved in this scheme of
colonization, we can speak more directly from the circumstance that we
find them recognised as just and good by the General Assembly of our
Church. The records of the Assembly of 1845 bear the following
deliverance on the subject:--'The General Assembly learn with great
pleasure the prospect of the speedy establishment of the Scotch colony
of New Edinburgh [now Otago] in New Zealand, consisting of members of
the Free Church, and with every security for the colonists being
provided with the ordinances of religion and the means of education in
connection with this Church. Without expressing any opinion regarding
the secular advantages or prospects of the proposed undertaking, the
General Assembly highly approve of the principles on which the
settlement is proposed to be conducted, in so far as the religious and
educational interests of the colonists are concerned; and the
Assembly desire to countenance and encourage the association in these
respects.'
We have seen the waste of mind which takes place in the colonies of a
very highly civilised country adverted to in a rather fanciful and
rationalistic connection with the desponding reply of the captive Jews
to their spoilers: 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land?' Ages, sometimes whole centuries, elapse, remarks the
commentator, ere the colonies of even eminently literary nations come
to possess poets and fine writers of their own. There is first a
struggle for bare existence among the colonists, during which the
higher branches of learning are necessarily neglected; and when a
better time at length comes, the general mind is found to have
acquired, during the struggle, a homely and utilitarian cast, which
militates against the right appreciation, and of course the
production, of what is excellent. And thus the true divinities of song
fail to be sung in a foreign land. There is, we doubt not, truth in
the remark, though somewhat quaintly expressed, and somewhat
doubtfully derived. The necessities of a colony in its youth, and the
peculiar cast of mind which they serve to induce, are certainly not
favourable to the development of poetic genius. But there is, alas!
another and more scriptural sense in which the 'Lord's song' too often
ceases to be sung in a strange land. We have already adverted to the
process of deterioration, moral and religious, through which it comes
to be silenced; and it is one of the advantages of the Otago scheme,
that it makes provision in, we believe, the most effectual way
possible, in the present divided state of Protestantism, for
preventing a result so deplorable. Youth is an important season, as
certainly in colonies as in individuals; and we question whether the