488

ART. VII.-1. A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland by the BISHOP, at his Second Visitation, on the Feast of S. Matthew, 1847. St. John's, &c.

2. Church in the Colonies. Nos. 10, 15, 19, 21, 25. A Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland's Visitation of the Missions of the Western and Southern Coast-On the Northern Coast· A Visit to Labrador.―Journal of the Bishop's Voyage of Visitation and Discovery on the South and West Coasts of Newfoundland, and on the Labrador, in the Church Ship, in the year 1848.—Journal of the Bishop's Voyage, &c. to Labrador, in the year 1819. London: S. P. G.; & S. P. C. K. Depositories, 1846-1849.

3. S. P. G. Quarterly Papers, &c. &c.

THE stiff, unpliable, unaccommodating character of the English mind, is both our pride and shame, according to the character which we assume, or the end we have in view, when we affect either to deplore or to boast of it. In either case, the swagger or the regret are often alike affected or conventional. It is by no means true that we do not accommodate ourselves to our circumstances; few people have the happy art of acknowledging so readily the requirements of an altered state of society as ourselves. A great colonizing people must do this: they who seek a new sun, and stars not their own, can take neither all their habits of mind, nor of body, with them. What has, in fact, prevented our French neighbours from being great colonists, is their utter helplessness in new scenes. When all Europe had a fair start for America, it surely argues something for English capability of self-adaptation, that, with the exception of the great Iberian colonies, the Anglo-Saxon race alone has maintained itself from the Labrador to Trinidad; the tropics and the pole seem to set no boundaries to our powers of acclimatization.

And yet this power of accommodation may exist in combination with another development of character-that of preserving, and expanding, and even exaggerating national or party peculiarities. Old England's self-reliance may rapidly bloom into New England's conceit; and Australian boorishness is only the legitimate result of the British farmer's frankness. What, however, we would have all students of moral ethnology, as soon as there is such a science, observe, is, that colonies and colonization do not always tend to a vicious extreme; that they also have a further function in the great social economy of nations,

that of preserving (often in distorted, and occasionally in grotesque, forms) the old traditions, the ancient faith, the unalloyed morals of the mother country. If even many an old Roman custom and tradition survives in Spain-if France of the ancient régime is only to be found in its transatlantic Acadia and Hochelaga--the true and normal type of England may yet exist in its colonies, long after it has been effaced by the levelling process, which, in things of mind as well as of matter, we are now welcoming. One result of the spread of confraternity principles-the principles of our cheap excursion trips to Paris and Cologne, and of our 1851 Exhibition-our Peace-conventions and our Electric telegraphs-is not so much

That the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd, In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world;' but that man and the world, peoples and languages, will all sink into the neutral tint of a dull, unexcited and unexciting commonplace and monotony. It will not be pleasant when all national distinctions are to be plastered over with the white-wash and cement of a hollow mediocrity and conventionalism: we rather prefer the sharp edge and deeply cut light and shade of individual and national character. The universal sky is none the better for being of one unpretending drab and we scarcely welcome the fog and mist, which secures uniformity, it is true, but only by annihilating colour and distance and form. Even if we cannot secure a stereotyped edition of politics, or of morals, we are, though with that loss, to be thankful that the world has yet been spared a centralization of manners.

And these considerations suggest themselves, not perhaps unnaturally, when we come to look at our present subject, which takes up two elements, that of colonial character-and yet more of religion. Religion is of course one and indivisible; substantially and essentially the same, and uniform, or rather unigenous: but we have observed a danger in exaggerating the supposed necessity of a cast-iron phase of religion, as though in none of its developments it could be genuine unless it were patented and registered according to a fixed formula, and conformed to unswerving canons. If the mediæval type of profession and practice is, and with justice, found of other than universal application-if the eremitic or the claustral life is not to be preached as the one way of salvation-it were well for us to consider, that the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century shapes of English religion may be very real in themselves, while susceptible of re-adaptation according to the varying exigencies of society, or politics, or even climate; so that religious life do at the same time preserve the broader, more massive essentials of national character, on the one hand,―to secure which is one

function of a colony-and so that, on the other, it displays sufficient of plastic energy to suit and adapt itself to changed scenery and requirements, which is another,—it adequately fulfils its purpose. And when and where Colonial Church-ofEnglandism-to use an ugly phrase-does this, it is a subject not unworthy of something more than a passing thought.

The brief religious history of Newfoundland is shortly told: discovered on the festival from which its capital takes its name, S. John Baptist's day, 1497, by the Venetian, (or Englishman,) Cabot, Newfoundland was not colonized till 1583 by Sir Humfrey Gilbert, Raleigh's brother-in-law. Successive immigrations, of which the chief was that of Lord Baltimore, then Sir George Calvert-this was of Roman Catholics-soon raised the colony to some fiscal importance: but the desultory and unsystematic character of our ecclesiastical system left Newfoundland without even a resident clergyman till 1703, when the newly-founded Society for the Propagation of the Gospel appointed a Mr. Jackson to the solitary Mission. The lamp was just kept burning, solely by the exertions of this Society, until our own days witnessed the gradually growing sense of our responsibilities, both towards our colonies and to the Missionary character of the Church. While it was not until 1786 that the Roman Catholics, always the majority of the population in Newfoundland, received a Vicar Apostolic, it was still later, in 1839, that the Episcopate was extended to S. John's. Previously to this time, Newfoundland was in the spiritual charge of an Archdeacon, appointed by the See of Nova Scotia; and it does not appear that it ever received the pontifical offices until 1827, when the Bishop of Nova Scotia first visited the island, and consecrated the churches and graveyards.

In 1823, a voluntary English society was established, not, we believe, without pious objects, but after the ordinary low, unecclesiastical method of such societies-under the title of the Church of England School Society, for Educating the Poor of Newfoundland. This Society, which certainly did some good, employed such instruments as it could compass-men and women-catechists and schoolmasters-dissenters and churchmen--of any and no capacity, or Church principles. The Society might or might not have done better: but a formidable precedent for the most objectionable part of its system is to be found in the fact of the Lutheran Missionaries of the older Church societies in our Indian possessions.

In 1839, the first English Bishop for Newfoundland was appointed, Dr. Aubrey Spencer, the chief, indeed the only important, event of whose short Episcopate, was the almost instantaneous ordination, all but per saltum, of many of the school

masters, in the employment of the Society just mentioned. This measure at once elevated the clerical body to a respectable force-in numbers. In 1843, Bishop Spencer was translated to Jamaica, and the Rev. Edward Feild, late Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, was consecrated second Bishop of Newfoundland, on Sunday, April 28, 1844. It is with this Episcopate that we are at present concerned; and what we would try to show is, that it exhibits a definite character-a form and body of substantial, active living exertion-that it displays a solid energy, and presents an intelligible phase and cast of the Christian life and ministry-not, we will say, thank God, without its parallels in the English Colonial Church, but still—of a sufficiently vigorous growth to be surveyed as a whole. But before we try to survey the work, we must first realize its scenery and external circumstances.

Calum crebris imbribus ac nebulis fœdum: asperitas frigorum adest. For though Newfoundland is on the same parallel of latitude as Mid-France, it will be remembered, that the vast ice-continents, forests, and lakes of North America carry the glacial line much lower than in Europe. Not only is Newfoundland subject to a very long and severe winter-a winter which freezes the sea, and permits icebergs to obstruct the very harbour of S. John's-but it is a peculiarly desolate and barren place. Sir Charles Lyell notices this feature in passing its iron coast. On the eastern side, at least, it is destitute of timber, and except round the capital, of cultivation.

'Adde loci faciem, nec fronde nec arbore læti,

Et quod iners hyemi continuatur hyems.

Campi cultore carentes

Vastaque, quæ nemo vindicet, arva jacent.'

In some places there is scarcely earth enough to cover the dead. A few scattered fishing settlements break the barren uniformity of the rugged coast line, but the roads of communication between them are only the waves. In the interior, considerable forests, extensive lakes, and impassable swamps, rendered more difficult by the crowded masses of the inferior trailing plants, the berry-bearing tribes of a semi-Arctic region, forbid all traffic across the island. The whole of the interior of Newfoundland, a country of about the size of Ireland, has never been explored and as though to complete the picture of desolation, the fog-blast, which perpetually broods over the great Atlantic bank, and whose proximity sensibly diminishes the temperature at some hundred miles' distance, very frequently envelopes the whole dreary coast of this untoward climate with a thick, palpable, cold cloud of driving mist. A few of the common kitchen vegetables are grown rapidly in the brief summer; but the ordinary food of even the better classes is

only salt fish and mess-pork, and their luxury frozen beef; and not seldom, from the difficulty of communicating with the capital, people even with means are reduced to a state of absolute want.

Now, for such a place it is not naturally easy to find people who are content with wages, which are paid only in the heavenly treasury, to exchange the decent comforts of home: not naturally easy, we say, to find even a Bishop, Priest, and Deacons. And so when such are found, we do not count of it as any very great and heroic thing, though even this it might be deemed, were we inclined to talk largely, as some do: but we call attention to this Mission, because it shows our own Church, according to its own native English character, practically at work; it shows men, simple men, setting their shoulders to the wheel diligently, and with a brave manly earnestness: it flows from a stout, steady, practical religion, called out by no spasm of sentimentalism, but is the natural growth of a body of truth and devotion: it is to be quoted with no unworthy comparison, as something different in kind from the showiness of a new order, or the hysteric convulsions of a Revival, or the blaze of a new schism.

Premising that one of the earliest offerings made to the Bishop was not a chariot and pair, which has, we regret to say, been seen with an Episcopal burthen in the streets of even our own Transatlantic cities-not a centre-piece, such as was very injudiciously given the other day to an antipodean Bishop --but an unpoetical schooner, with the unchristian name of the Hawk, we may proceed to illustrate the general tone and spirit of the Newfoundland Mission, by extracts from Bishop Feild's last Journal of Visitation and Discovery to the Labrador. And if our selections seem unsystematic and disorderly, they will not the less aptly figure out the plans and labours of one who, like all truly great men, is most in order and most systematic, without mapping out his work in parallel columns and on ruled paper. Indeed, this is quite a characteristic of the little books from which we quote: their utter simplicity, the vigour with which they speak of truly great and noble deeds, just as a matter of course. Duty seems rather to flow on like a stream, than to be sought by unnatural efforts. We are not called upon to look at a great system moving like an animated machine: we are hardly aware that any specific action recorded in these Visitation Journals is in itself of unearthly dimensions or colossal proportions, but we cannot help being struck by the power which they show-the great inner depths of love and faith, at work somehow and somewhere, the store of daily offices of common duty which they open up, though often only by momentary glimpses.

We started [this was the Labrador voyage of 1849] with a fair wind. All my companions, except Moreton, were soon very sick. The wind