’He does not look well; and at first we were quite uneasy, for his eyes were heavy and puffed, but he is much better, and confesses that dinners and evenings here do him good, though he quite denies the starving, and Mrs. Knowles also.  She says he gets over anxious in mind, and was completely chilled the week he sat in the hall.  No doubt his house is still both cold and damp, and the Church the same, and therefore the labour of reading and preaching is very great.  We are by degrees interesting him in our winter life, having heard all his performances and plans; and he is very glad to have us back, though much too busy to have missed us when we were away.  Now he has daily morning service, with a lecture; and if it lasts, the impression he has made is really extraordinary.  We may well pray that he should not be vain of his works.  There are men whose whole lives seem changed, if I am to believe what I hear.’

Such was the young Deacon’s early success.  With an affectionate brother close at hand, and friends within easy reach, his Fellowship preserving his connection with Oxford, his father’s and brother’s profession with London, in fact, all England could offer; and he would easily have it in his power to take fresh holidays on the Continent and enjoy those delights of scenery, architecture, art and music, which he loved with an appreciation and enthusiasm that could easily have become an absorbing passion.  Who could have a smoother, easier, pleasanter career open to him than the Rev. John Coleridge Patteson at six and twenty?

Yet even then, the wish breathed to his mother, at fourteen, that he might devote himself to the cause of the heathen, lay deep in his heart; although for the present, he was, as it were, waiting to see what God would have him do, whether his duty to his father required him to remain at hand, or whether he might be called to minister in some great English manufacturing town.

Early in 1854, it became known that the Bishop of New Zealand and Mrs. Selwyn were about to spend a year in England.  Coley’s aspirations to mission work were renewed.  The thoughts excited by the sermons he had heard at Eton twelve years previously grew in force.  He remembered his mother’s promise of her blessing, and seriously considered of offering himself to assist in the work in the Southern Hemisphere.  He discussed the matter seriously with his friend, Mr. Gardiner, who was strongly of opinion that the scheme ought not to be entertained during his father’s lifetime.  He acquiesced; but if his heart and mind were convinced, his soul and spirit were not, and the yearnings for the forefront of the battle were not quenched, though there was no slackening of zeal over the present little flock, to make them suspect that he had a thought beyond.