Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands. Yonge Charlotte Mary
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for truly he was upheld by the strength of willing sacrifice. Those were likewise sustained who felt the spirit of missionary enterprise and sympathy, which was at that time so strongly infused into the Church; but the shock was severe to many, and especially to the brother who had been devoted to Coley from their earliest infancy, and among his relations the grief was great.
As to the district of Alfington, the distress was extreme. The people had viewed Mr. Patteson as their exclusive property, and could not forgive the Bishop of New Zealand for, as they imagined, tempting him away. 'Ah! Sir,' was the schoolmistress's answer to some warm words from Mr. Justice Coleridge in praise of Bishop Selwyn, 'he may be—no doubt he is—a very good man. I only wish he had kept his hands off Alfington.' 'It would not be easy,' says the parishioner from whom I have already quoted, 'to describe the intense sorrow in view of separation. Mr. Patteson did all he could to assure us that it was his own will and act, consequent upon the conviction that it was God's will that he should go, and to exonerate the Bishop, but for some time he was regarded as the immediate cause of our loss; and he never knew half the hard things said of him by the same people who, when they heard he was coming, and would preach on the Sunday, did their utmost to make themselves and their children look their very best.'
Indeed, the affectionate writer seems to have shared the poor people's feeling that they had thus festally received a sort of traitor with designs upon their pastor. She goes on to tell of his ministrations to her mother, whose death-bed was the first he attended as a Priest.
It would be impossible for me to say all he was to her. Not long before her death, when he had just left the room, she said, 'I have not felt any pain or weakness whilst Mr. Patteson has been here.' I was not always present during his visits to her, and I think their closer communings were only known to Him above, but their effects were discernible in that deep confidence in him on her part, and that lasting impression on him, for you will remember, in his letter last April, he goes back in memory to that time, and calls it—'a solemn scene in my early ministry.' Solemn, indeed, it was to us all that last night of her life upon earth. He was with her from about the middle of the day on Monday until about four o'clock on Tuesday morning; when, after commending her soul to God, he closed her eyes with his own hands, and taking out his watch, told us the hour and moment of her departure. He then went home and apprised Miss Wilkins of her death in these words: 'My soul fleeth unto the LORD before the morning watch, I say before the morning watch,' and at the earliest dawn of day, the villagers were made aware that she had passed away by the tolling bell, and tolled by him. This was not the only death during his ministry among us; but it was the first occasion where he gave the Communion of the Sick, also when he read the Burial Service. Cases of rejoicing with those that rejoiced as well as of weeping with those that wept, the child and the aged seemed alike to appreciate his goodness. In him were combined those qualities which could inspire with deep reverence and entire confidence. Many, many are or will be the stars in the crown of his rejoicing, and some owe to him under God, their deeper work of grace in the heart and their quickening in the divine life.'
A remarkable testimony is this to the impression remaining after the lapse of sixteen years from a ministry extending over no more than seventeen months. 'Our Mr. Patteson' the people called him to the last.
Yet, in the face of all this grief, the parting till death, the work broken off, the life cut short midway, the profusion of needs at home for able ministers, is it to be regretted that Coleridge Patteson devoted himself to the more remote fields abroad? I think we shall find that his judgment was right. Alfington might love him dearly, but the numbers were too small to afford full scope for his powers, and he would have experienced the trials of cramped and unemployed energies had he remained there beyond his apprenticeship. Nor were his gifts, so far as can be judged, exactly those most requisite for work in large towns. He could deal with individuals better than with masses, and his metaphysical mind, coupled with the curious difficulty he had in writing to an unrealised public, either in sermons or reports, might have rendered him less effective than men of less ability. He avoided, moreover, the temptations, pain, and sting of the intellectual warfare within the bosom of the Church, and served her cause more effectually on her borders than he could in her home turmoils. His great and peculiar gifts of languages, seconded by his capacity for navigation, enabled him to be the builder up of the Melanesian Church in so remarkable a manner that one can hardly suppose but that he was marked out for it, and these endowments would have found no scope in an ordinary career. Above all, no man can safely refuse the call to obey the higher leadings of grace. If he deny them, he will probably fall below that which he was before, and lose 'even that which he seemeth to have.'
A few days later, he wrote to his cousin Arthur Coleridge an expression of his feelings regarding the step he had taken in the midst of the pain it was costing to others:—
'Feniton: November 11, 9 A.M.
'My dear Arthur,—Your letter was very acceptable because I am, I confess, in that state of mind occasionally when the assurance of my being right, coming from another, tends to strengthen my own conviction.
'I do not really doubt as I believe; and yet, knowing my want of consideration for others, and many other thoughts which naturally prevent my exercising a clear sound judgment on a matter affecting myself, I sometimes (when I have had a conversation, it throws me back upon analysing my own conduct) feel inclined to go over the whole process again, and that is somewhat trying.
'On the other hand, I am almost strangely free from excitement. I live on exactly as I did before: and even when alone with Father, talk just as I used to talk, have nothing more to tell him, not knowing how to make a better use of these last quiet evenings.
'By-and-by I shall wish I had done otherwise, perhaps, but I do not know now, that I have anything specially requiring our consideration: we talk about family matters, the movements in the theological and political world, &c., very little about ourselves.
'One of all others I delight to think of for the music's sake, and far more for the glorious thought that it conveys. "Then shall the righteous," not indeed that I dare apply it to myself (as you know), but it helps one on, teaches what we may be, what our two dear parents are, and somehow the intervening, space becomes smaller as the eye is fixed steadily on the glory beyond.
'God bless you, my dear fellow.
'Ever your affectionate
The Mission party intended to sail immediately after Christmas in the 'Southern Cross,' the schooner which was being built at Blackwall for voyages among the Melanesian isles. In expectation of this, Patteson went up to London in the beginning of December, when the admirable crayon likeness was taken by Mr. Richmond, an engraving from which is here given. He then took his last leave of his uncle, and of the cousins who had been so dear to him ever since the old days of daily meeting in childhood; and Miss Neill, then a permanent invalid, notes down: 'On December 13, I had the happiness of receiving the Holy Communion from dear Coley Patteson, and the following morning I parted from him, as I fear, for ever. God bless and prosper him, and guard him in all the dangers he will encounter!' He wrote thus soon after his return:—
'Feniton: December 22, 1854.
'My dear Miss Neill,—I began a note to you a day or two ago, but I could not go on with it, for I have had so very much to do in church and out of it, parochializing, writing sermons, &c. It makes some little difference in point of time whether I am living here or at Alfington, and so the walking about from one house to another is not so convenient for writing letters as for thinking over sermons.
'I need not tell you what a real happiness and comfort it is to me to have been with you again and to have talked so long with you, and most of all to have received the Communion with you. It is a blessed thought that no interval of space or time can interrupt that Communion of the Spirit, and that we are one in Him, though working in different corners of the Lord's field.
'I want to look you out a little book or two; and Fanny has told you that if ever my picture is photographed, I have particularly desired them to send you a copy with my love. Your cross I have now round my neck, and I shall always wear it; it will hang there with a locket containing locks of hair of my dear Father and Mother, the girls, and Jem.
'You will be glad to hear that they all seem cheerful and hearty. Fan is not well,