Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,026 pages of information about Life of John Coleridge Patteson .

Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,026 pages of information about Life of John Coleridge Patteson .

The next two were great days of letter writing.  Another long full letter was written to the father, telling of the additional record which each of the three consecrating Bishops had written in the Bible of his childhood, and then going into business matters, especially hoping that the Warden and Fellows of Merton would not suppose that as a Bishop he necessarily had £5,000 a year and a palace, whereas in fact the see had no more than the capital of £5,000 required by Government!  He had already agreed with his father that his own share of the inheritance should go to the Mission; and, as he says, on hearing the amount:—­

’Hard enough you worked, my dear Father, to leave your children so well off.  Dear old Jem will have enough; and my children now dwell in 200 islands, and will need all that I can give them.  God grant that the day may come when many of them may understand these things, and rise up and call your memory blessed!

’Your words of comfort and blessing come to me with fresh strength just now, two days only after the time when you too, had you been here, would in private have laid your hand on my head and called down God’s blessing upon me.  I shall never know in this world what I owe to your prayers.’

There is much, too, of his brother’s marriage; and in a separate letter to the sisters there are individual acknowledgments of each article of the equipment, gratifying the donor by informing her that the ‘cutaway’ coat was actually to be worn that very evening at a dinner party at the Chief Justice’s, and admiring the ‘gambroon,’ which turned out to be the material of the cassock, so much as to wish for a coat made of it for the islands.  Apropos of the hat:—­ ’You know my forehead is square, so that an oval hat does not fit; it would hang on by the temples, which form a kind of right angle with the forehead.’

Another letter of that 26th was from the Bishop of Wellington to Dr. Goodford respecting this much-loved old pupil:—­

’Anything more conscientious and painstaking cannot be conceived than the way he has steadily directed every talent, every hour or minute of his life, to the one work he had set before him.  However small or uncongenial or drumdrudgery-like his occupation, however hard, or dangerous, or difficult, it seemed to be always met in the same calm, gentle, self-possessed spirit of love and duty, which I should fancy that those who well knew his good and large-minded, large-hearted father, and his mother, whom I have always heard spoken of as saintly, could best understand.  Perhaps the most marked feature in his character is his genuine simplicity and humility.  I never saw it equalled in one so gifted and so honoured and beloved.

’It is really creditable to the community to see how universal is the admiration for his character, for he is so very good, so exceedingly unworldly, and therefore such a living rebuke to the selfishness of the world; and though so gentle, yet so firm and uncompromising that you would have supposed he would hardly be popular outside the circle of friends who know him and understand him.  Certainly he is the most perfect character I ever met.’

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Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.