TO JUDGE'S BAY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 126, 30 May 1942, Page 8

TO JUDGE'S BAY

CHURCH PILGRIMAGE

MEMORY OF BISHOP SELWYN

It was the pilgrimage of the Anglicans of New Zealand, occurring but once in 100 years, and the Mecca was the beach at Judge's Bay, Parnell. T,ed by choristers and a band, a dignified and picturesque procession of bishops, clergy, lay readers and laity this afternoon made its way with a joyous reverence from St. Mary's Cathedral, Parnell, down St. Stephen's Avenue and along the winding slopes past the pretty _ and historic St. Stephen's Church to" the waterfront on Judge's Bay. There a service was held to celebrate the landing at the bay a century ago to-day of George Augustus Selwyn, first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand.

The face of Nature has vastly changed since Bishop Selwyn performed the aet. of oblation by kneeling on the sand and giving thanks to God when he first landed, and several adjacent bays of KM) years ago have gone from the shoreline. But this Mecca of the Anglican Church followers, buttressed by the railway embankment, has been safeguarded.

The service included prayers for the Church and the people of New Zealand, embracing the Maori race, messages by Archbishop Averiil, the Bishops of Aotearoa and Waikato, and an address by Dr. W. J. Simkin, Bishop of Auckland.

"The event which we commemorate and for which we thank God today, makes this spot indeed hallowed ground," said Bishop Simkin, in a sermon preached in the open air. Sclwyn was only ;i years of age. one hundred vcars ago to-day. said the bishop, when he iowed himself, as the dawn broke, from the ship in which he had come and set foot, there on the soil of .Yew Zealand. How young a man to be entrusted with the responsibility of the high office of Bishop of New Zealand, with the care of the infant Church in this land, with the double responsibility of being the chief shepherd of two races entirely different in colour, in tradition, in practice and in outlook, and with the difficult task of exercising authority over men older than himself in years and veterans in the service of the Church to which he had been sent.

The greatest significance of the commemoration and thanksgiving on the spot on which Selwvn landed was the appeal which his youth should make to the youth of Now Zealand to-dav. In the dire conflict, through which the world to-day was passing New Zealand's sons and daughters had acquitted themselves with a sense of duty, with valour, with heroism and with self-sacrifice, to a degree unexcelled by the youth of any other country in the gteat British Commonwealth of Nations.