I have given at length this account of Patteson’s fundamental teaching, though to some it may seem to savour of the infant school, because in spite of being hampered by imperfect knowledge of the language, he has thrown into it the great principle both of his action and teaching; namely, the restoration of the union of mankind with God through Christ.  It never embraced that view of the heathen world which regards it as necessarily under God’s displeasure, apart from actual evil, committed in wilful knowledge that it is evil.  He held fast to the fact of man having been created in the image of God, and held that whatever good impulses and higher qualities still remained in the heathen, were the remnants of that Image, and to be hailed accordingly.  Above all, he realised in his whole life the words to St. Peter:  ’What God hath cleansed that call not thou common,’ and not undervaluing for a moment Sacramental Grace, viewed human nature, while yet without the offer thereof, as still the object of fatherly and redeeming love, and full of fitful tokens of good coming from the only Giver of life and holiness, and needing to be brought nearer and strengthened by full union and light, instead of being left to be quenched in the surrounding flood of evil.  ’And were by nature the children of wrath,’ he did not hold to mean that men were objects of God’s anger, lying under His deadly displeasure; but rather, children of wild impulse, creatures of passion, swayed resistlessly by their own desires, until made ‘children of grace,’ and thus obtaining the spiritual power needful to enable them to withstand these passions.  An extract from the sermon he had preached at Sydney may perhaps best serve to illustrate his principle:—­

’And this love once generated in the heart of man, must needs pass on to his brethren; that principle of life must needs grow and expand with its own inherent energy; the seed must be developed into the tree, and strike its roots deep and wide, and stretch out its branches unto the sea and its boughs unto the rivers.  No artificial nor accidental circumstances can confine it, it recognises no human ideas of nationality, or place, or time, but embraces like the dome of heaven all the works of God.  And love is the animating principle of all.  In every star of the sky, in the sparkling, glittering waves of the sea, in every flower of the field, in every creature of God, most of all in every living soul of man, it adores and blesses the beauty and the love of the great Creator and Preserver of all.

’Viewed indeed from that position which was occupied by ancient philosophers, the existing contrarieties between nations might well appear inexplicable, and intellectual powers might seem to be the exclusive heritage of particular nations.  But Christianity leads us to distinguish between the nature of man as he came fresh from the hands of his Creator, and that natural propensity to sin which he has inherited