Abstract
G. A. Selwyn, first and only Bishop of New Zealand, was a great Anglican, bishop and church leader. His remarkable life has attracted biography from the first – H. W. Tucker (1879), G. H. Curteis (1889), J. H. Evans (1964) – and, more recently, an outstanding book of essays, A Controversial Churchman (2011). He has certainly deserved more than a footnote in Michael King’s History of New Zealand of 2003. By contrast, he was one of the founders of the New Zealand nation as constituted after the Treaty of Waitangi established British rule in 1840, along with his fellow graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, Chief Justice Martin and the strong, if devious, governor, Sir George Grey.
The present study started life as a Cambridge PhD and Dr Wilson bases his claim for originality on his study of Selwyn’s unpublished sermons. While acknowledging Selwyn’s sympathy for the Tractarians, he is anxious to place him ecclesiastically with those like W. F. Hook of Leeds, better seen as traditional high churchmen. New Zealand, however, offered Selwyn the opportunity to pursue the anti-Erastian stance of the Tractarians, when it became plain that the Crown–Establishment model of church life was not to be reproduced in the colonies, however much the early W. G. Broughton and Bishop Charles Perry in Australia or Henry Venn and A. C. Tait at home might regret it. Selwyn was at his most creative in introducing synodical government in 1857, which provided for bishops, clergy and laity voting in houses, so pre-dating the home church by over 100 years.
Selwyn’s relationship with the pioneering mission of CMS, resulting from Samuel Marsden’s efforts from 1814, are handled here, with tension arising over placement of missionaries and, still more, over the bishop’s exacting standards for Maori ministerial candidates, where Dr Wilson judges he failed (p. 179) with saddening later defections. Selwyn’s great energy extended into Melanesia, with the inspired choice of John Coleridge Patteson to develop the mission. He left New Zealand reluctantly in 1867 for a further vigorous episcopate as Bishop of Lichfield and is rightly seen with Samuel Wilberforce as a source of a revived episcopate. He played a prominent part in the Lambeth Conference of 1867 and contributed towards the cohesion of Anglicanism by visits to the USA and Canada in 1871 and 1874. If there is a corrective needed to this theme of greatness it may come from his fellow translator of the Bible into Maori, Robert Maunsell, Hebrew scholar of Trinity College Dublin and CMS missionary, who in general admired him and his commitment to the ‘advancement of the gospel’ but added: ‘still he has many great faults; excessive irritability; democratic in principle … remarkably autocratic in action’ and, despite great physical courage, for Maunsell too sensitive to public opinion to be always morally courageous. That said, in the words of Archbishop Sir Paul Reeves, ‘Selwyn was a great man’.
This is a thoroughly researched, interesting and welcome study of an important figure.