fellow
churchmen of Canterbury to put forth a protest against it. Any plan for
the government of the Church should emanate (they argued) from the
episcopate, and should be dutifully accepted by the faithful. They
themselves would therefore refrain from any detailed suggestions, but
they strongly maintained the right of even the infant Church of New
Zealand to deal, if necessary, with questions of doctrine and ritual,
and even of the translation of the Scriptures. Cordially as they were
attached to their Prayer Book and to their Bible, they yet could foresee
a time when occasion might arise for change.

What Selwyn's own feeling on this matter might be, it is not easy to
discover. But as, in their conversations at Lyttelton, he and Mr. Godley
always found themselves in agreement, it seems not unlikely that on this
point also the minds of the two men were in accord. But the bishop could
not do as he would in this as in many other matters. The Committee of
the C.M.S. had already taken alarm at a step which seemed likely to
separate the colonial Church from that of the Mother Country, and they
sent out instructions to their missionaries forbidding them to take part
in the proposed convention.[10] This was one of the reasons which
prompted the visit of the bishop to England in 1854. Before he set sail,
however, he had called meetings in all the different centres of
population; at these meetings he had laid his scheme before the Church,
and he had carefully codified the criticisms which were offered. In most
localities the draft was accepted as it stood. Auckland seems to have
devised the idea of uniting bishop, clergy, and laity in one chamber.
Christchurch had lost its man of insight through Godley's departure, and
it now swung round into a merely conservative position. It joined with
the rest of the settlements in insisting upon the principle of the Grey
scheme, by which the Prayer Book and Authorised Version of the Bible
were declared to be outside the powers of any New Zealand synod.

[10] Even as late as the year 1866 the Secretary of the C.M.S. (the
Rev. Henry Venn) could write out to New Zealand: "If all the colonial
churches are to be made free, the Church of England would be ruined as
a missionary church. The people of England would never send out
missionaries to be under Free Bishops."

The disappearance of Godley, with his visions of independence, made the
task of the bishop more easy when he confront