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 .

’Your loving Brother,

‘J.  C. Patteson.’

Herewith was a letter for Dr. Moberly:—­

’St. Andrew’s College, Kohimarama:  August 29, 1863.  ’My dear Dr. Moberly,—­Thank you for a very kind and most interesting letter written in May.  I know that you can with difficulty find time to write at all, and thank you all the more.  If you knew the real value to us of such letters as you have now sent, containing your impressions and opinions of things in general, men, books, &c., you would be well rewarded for your trouble, I assure you.  To myself, I must say to you, such letters are invaluable; they are a real help to me, not only in that they supply information from a very good authority on many questions which I much desire to understand, but even more because I rise up or kneel down after reading them, and think to myself, “how little such men who so think of me really know me; how different I ought to be,” and then it is another help to me to try and become by God’s grace less unlike what you take me to be.  Indeed, you must forgive me for writing thus freely.  I live very much alone as far as persons of the same language, modes of thought, &c., are concerned.  I see but little (strange as it may seem to you) even of my dear Primate.  We are by land four or five miles apart, and meet perhaps once or twice a month for a few minutes to transact some necessary business.  His time is, of course, fully occupied; and I never leave this place, very seldom even this little quadrangle, and when other work does not need immediate attention (a state of things at which I have not arrived as yet), there are always a dozen new languages to be taken up, translations to be made, &c.  So that when I read a letter which is full of just such matters as I think much of, I naturally long to talk on paper freely with the writer.  Were I in England, I know scarcely any place to which I would go sooner than Winchester, Hursley, Otterbourne, and then I should doubtless talk as now I write freely.  All that you write of the state of mind generally in England on religious questions is most deeply interesting.  What a matter of thankfulness that you can say, “With all the sins and shortcomings that are amongst us, there is an unmistakeable spreading of devotion and the wish to serve God rightly on the part of very many.”

’Then, the Church preferments have lately been good; Bishop Ellicott, one of your four coadjutors in the revision of the A. V., especially.  I know some part of his Commentary, and am very glad to find that you speak so very highly of it.  What a contrast to be sure between such work as his and Jowett’s and Stanley’s!  Jowett actually avows a return to the old exploded theory of the inaccurate use of language in the Greek Testament.  This must make men distrust him sooner or later as an interpreter of Scripture.  I thank you heartily for your offer of sending me Bishop Ellicott’s Commentary,

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