ch serving for a congregation which was "neither so regular nor so
good" as might have been wished. Altogether the diocese appeared to the
bishop as "an inert mass which I am utterly unable to heave."

The fulcrum upon which the bishop depended in his efforts to heave the
mass was St. John's College, and the college at this time was bringing
troubles of its own. In 1847 it suffered a terrible visitation of
typhoid fever. The bishop's own two little boys were stricken, and a son
of Archdeacon W. Williams died. At one time no less than forty cases
were calling for the attention of the staff. Through the care of the
medical deacon, Dr. Purchas, the epidemic proved less deadly than had at
one time seemed inevitable; but its appearance showed the unwisdom of
combining a public hospital with an educational establishment. Even
without this special plague, the daily routine was too rigorous to be
maintained. English parents began to withdraw their sons from an
institution in which Maoris so largely predominated; the Maoris could be
kept at work only by constant supervision; the deacon schoolmasters, to
whom the duty of superintendence was committed, were more eager to begin
preaching than to perform thoroughly the humbler duties of the kitchen
and the field. Those who were willing to do the humble work found that
they had little time or energy left for intellectual pursuits. The ideal
was not practical. More and more it became evident that the very
continuance of the scheme depended upon the bishop himself. "Everything
in the way of system," he wrote, "from the cleaning of a knife upwards,
passes in some form or other through my mind." The result was "a turmoil
of much serving, which had in it more of Martha than of Mary"; and he
has to face the possibility of the failure of plans "conceived, it may
be, in pride rather than in faith."

But the communistic ideal still held the bishop's mind, and at one time
(1848) there seemed a prospect of its realisation in an unexpected
spot--the Chatham Islands. To this lonely field a Lutheran mission had
come in 1846, and the bishop sailed thither with great hopes of bringing
it into his system. He visited these German folk--five men and three
women--and found them indeed "living in that simple and primitive way
which is the true type of a missionary establishment. They seem to be as
one family, and to have all things in common." At first, it looked as
though their chief might consent to re