’I ought not to shrink back now.  The thought has become familiar to me, and I have the greatest confidence in the judgment of the Bishop of New Zealand; and I need not say how your words and letters and prayers too are helping me now.

’Indeed, though at any great crisis of our lives no doubt we are intended to use more than ordinary strictness in examining our motives and in seeking for greater grace, deeper repentance, more earnest and entire devotion to God, and amendment of life, yet I know that any strong-emotion, if it existed now, would pass away soon, and that I must be the same man as Bishop as I am now, in this sense, viz., that I shall have just the same faults, unless I pray for strength to destroy them, which I can do equally well now, and that all my characteristic and peculiar habits of mind will remain unchanged by what will only change my office and not myself.  So that where I am indolent now I shall be indolent henceforth, unless I seek to get rid of indolence; and I shall not be at all better, wiser, or more consistent as Bishop than I am now by reason simply of being a Bishop.

’You know my meaning.  Now I apply what I write to prove that any strong excitement now would be no evidence of a healthy state of mind.  I feel now like myself, and that is not at all like what I wish to be.  And so I thank God that as before any solemn season special inducements to earnest repentance are put into our minds, so I now feel a special call upon me to seek by His grace to make a more faithful use of the means of usefulness which He gives me, that I may be wholly and entirely turned to Him, and so be enabled to do His will in Melanesia.  You know, my dearest Father, that I do not indeed undervalue the grace of Ordination; only I mean that the right use of any great event in one’s life, as I take it, is not to concentrate feeling so much on it as earnestness of purpose, prayer for grace, and for increase of simplicity and honesty and purity of heart.  Perhaps other matters affect me more than my supposed state of feeling, so that my present calmness may be attributed to circumstances of which I am partially ignorant; and, indeed, I do wonder that I am calm when one moment’s look at the map, or thought of the countless islands, almost overwhelms me.  How to get at them?  Where to begin?  How to find men and means?  How to decide upon the best method of teaching, &c.?  But I must try to be patient, and to be content with very small beginnings—­and endings, too, perhaps.

’Sunday, Feb. 24, St. Matthias, 10 A.M.—­The day is come, my dearest Father, and finds me, I thank God, very calm.  Yesterday, at 6 P.M., in the little chapel at Taurama, the three Bishops, the dear Judge, Lady Martin, Mrs. Abraham, Mr. Lloyd and I met together for special prayer.  How we missed Mrs. Selwyn, dear dear Mrs. Selwyn, from among us, and how my thoughts passed on to you!  Evening hymn, Exhortation in Consecration Service, Litany from the St. Augustine’s Missionary Manual, with the questions in Consecration Service turned into petitions, Psalm cxxxii., cxxxi., li.; Lesson i Tim. iii.; special prayer for the Elect Bishop among the heathen, for the conversion of the heathen; and the Gloria in Excelsis.