A remarkable testimony is this to the impression remaining after the lapse of sixteen years from a ministry extending over no more than seventeen months.  ‘Our Mr. Patteson’ the people called him to the last.

Yet, in the face of all this grief, the parting till death, the work broken off, the life cut short midway, the profusion of needs at home for able ministers, is it to be regretted that Coleridge Patteson devoted himself to the more remote fields abroad?  I think we shall find that his judgment was right.  Alfington might love him dearly, but the numbers were too small to afford full scope for his powers, and he would have experienced the trials of cramped and unemployed energies had he remained there beyond his apprenticeship.  Nor were his gifts, so far as can be judged, exactly those most requisite for work in large towns.  He could deal with individuals better than with masses, and his metaphysical mind, coupled with the curious difficulty he had in writing to an unrealised public, either in sermons or reports, might have rendered him less effective than men of less ability.  He avoided, moreover, the temptations, pain, and sting of the intellectual warfare within the bosom of the Church, and served her cause more effectually on her borders than he could in her home turmoils.  His great and peculiar gifts of languages, seconded by his capacity for navigation, enabled him to be the builder up of the Melanesian Church in so remarkable a manner that one can hardly suppose but that he was marked out for it, and these endowments would have found no scope in an ordinary career.  Above all, no man can safely refuse the call to obey the higher leadings of grace.  If he deny them, he will probably fall below that which he was before, and lose ‘even that which he seemeth to have.’

A few days later, he wrote to his cousin Arthur Coleridge an expression of his feelings regarding the step he had taken in the midst of the pain it was costing to others:—­

’Feniton:  November 11, 9 A.M.

’My dear Arthur,—­Your letter was very acceptable because I am, I confess, in that state of mind occasionally when the assurance of my being right, coming from another, tends to strengthen my own conviction.

’I do not really doubt as I believe; and yet, knowing my want of consideration for others, and many other thoughts which naturally prevent my exercising a clear sound judgment on a matter affecting myself, I sometimes (when I have had a conversation, it throws me back upon analysing my own conduct) feel inclined to go over the whole process again, and that is somewhat trying.

’On the other hand, I am almost strangely free from excitement.  I live on exactly as I did before:  and even when alone with Father, talk just as I used to talk, have nothing more to tell him, not knowing how to make a better use of these last quiet evenings.

’By-and-by I shall wish I had done otherwise, perhaps, but I do not know now, that I have anything specially requiring our consideration:  we talk about family matters, the movements in the theological and political world, &c., very little about ourselves.