to have it so. And as appears, it was left to him to decide. For in 1861, Coleridge says to him in a letter, "How I think of you day and night, and how I thank you for all your love, and, perhaps most of all, not only for letting me come to Melanesia, but for your great love in never calling me away from my work even to see your face once more on earth." But the cross of that self-denial was heavy to bear. One of his associates says of him, at about that time, that when taxed with looking over-worked, he answered that "it was the anguish he endured, as night after night he lay awake thinking of his father gradually sinking and craving for him, and cheerfully resigning him, that really told upon him." That heroic old man in England and the other heroic souls about him, in the domestic circle, come into the reckoning of this life-story. they, are an inseparable part of it. On the one hand is John Coleridge Patteson among his naked savages; on the other, filling out the picture, is that refined English home that furnished the hero and evermore inspires him.

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It is a wonderful correspondence,—that between this father and son. It is heavenly, and grows heavenly to the end. When, at length, Sir John is aware that the hour of his departure is at hand, still he cheers on the soldier he has sent to the field.

The evening of the day word came of Coleridge's consecration to the episcopate, though for some while he had not for weakness attempted to read family prayers, he desired his daughters to let him do it. And where in the prayer for missions and missionaries he had been wont to add a petition "for the absent member of this family" he now, in a clear tone, substituted the words, "especially for John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop." And that was the last time he ever conducted household worship. He shortly passed away.

And the son, in those days, though little doubting that all was over, keeps on writing to him, just the same as he had, telling him all that was in his heart. It was to a father who was in his grave that the letter is written, which begins "It may be that as I write your blessed spirit, at rest in paradise, may know me more truly than ever you did on earth, but I must go on writing to you, even as I go on praying for you. It is a great comfort to me," and the letter is signed: "Now more than ever, Your loving and dutiful son." When finally the looked for sad news reached that son, he received it with entire calmness, but it was noticed that in reading the Commandments in the Church service the next Sunday, his voice trembled when he came to the Fifth.

It is in the light of such circumstances as these that we obtain a view of the quality of the friendship which God raised up in the persons of Coleridge Patteson and those nearest and dearest to him, for those poor black people. Rather, the time for it having in His divine Providence come, God went to England, to one of the most refined and cultured families of the realm, in which were garnered the fruits of the ages of His grace, for the man He had prepared to represent His friendship for them. It was an absolutely unstinted friendship: it had no limits: it lived, as it was generated, in the breath of the all-loving Holy Spirit.

Having said thus much of the Man, we may pass on now to speak of his Work. In so doing we shall confine ourselves mainly to the principles on which it was ordered, the view and policy of heathen evangelization according to which its methods were shaped. Patteson's time in the prosecution of it was not far from equally divided between what you might call,-to borrow military terms,—field and quarters. From four to six months of each year he usually spent in a visitation of his islands: and the rest of the year in the instruction, in a fixed place, of a company of native children and youth of both sexes, gathered during the visitation. On a number of these visitations at first he and Bishop

Selwyn went together, the latter to initiate the new-comer in the art of approaching the people, which he had acquired by experience.

In this connection may be related an occurrence that will illustrate the attitude, to which reference has been made, held by Bishop Selwyn toward other missionaries than those of his own communion. He and Patteson, en route for the islands beyond, stopping for a friendly call at a station of the London Missionary Society in the New Hebrides, found there the John G. Paton, so well known to us, overwhelmed with sudden sorrow by the death of his wife and child. What ensued is thus told in Paton's own words:

"Standing with me beside the grave of mother and child, I weeping aloud on his one hand, and Patteson-afterward the Martyr Bishop-sobbing silently on the other, the godly Bishop Selwyn poured out his heart to God amidst sobs and tears, during which he laid his hands on my head, and invoked Heaven's richest consolations on me and my trying labors." The virtue of that kind of Episcopal consecration (adds Mr. Paton, hardheaded Scotch Presbyterian as he is, with the blood of the Covenanters in him) I did and do most warmly appreciate. But there we see the barriers to communion how beautifully melting away in the

warmth of the divine fellowship of pity for souls in darkness! And at this point, as evidence of how cordially Patteson himself adopted and followed Selwyn's rule of brotherliness toward all missionaries may be added the incident that some years later, it having devolved on him, in peculiar circumstances to assume charge for a time of a station of a non-Episcopal mission, he lously conformed his manner of conducting it in all particulars to the usages that had there been practiced, though, in telling of it, he says he did greatly miss the help of the Prayer-book in conducting public worship.

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The School in which Patteson taught his young Melanesians was, for two years after he went out, till 1867, located in the vicinity of Auckland, New Zealand. It was then moved to Norfolk Island, six hundred miles to the northward nearer his field, there receiving the name of St. Barnabas' College, which it still bears,-the number of pupils varying in his time, from thirty to two hundred. It was more than a school or college in the ordinary sense, -an institute of Christian civilization: chief medium, also, of contact and acquaintance with the scattered, multitudinous communities at whose redemption he aimed. Annually, at the end of his one long term he took his pupils in his little vessel,