BISHOP SELWYN ON PROHIBITION.

Hawke's Bay Weekly Times, Volume 2, Issue 56, 27 January 1868, Page 22

BISHOP SELWYN ON PROHIBITION.

At the armusft meeting of the (gospel Foreign Propagation Spcietyiin. Manchester, on 7th October, the, Bishop of New'Zealand closed his address in the following manner : —The right reverend gentleman proceeded to speak of the mission of Bishop Patteson to the islands of the Pacific, and to his success, in respect to the descendants of the survivors of the mutineers of the Bounty, who had been transferred from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island. He said he had seen that day our gaol and assize courts; and they reminded him of the fearful model prisons which he had seen in Norfolk Island—for that was the place to which the worst criminals were sent from Port Jackson. In those dens where criminals formerly cursed God and man, they might now see little children of the Pitcairn race playing hide-and seek, and theft and drunkenness were unknown. (Cheers.) The reason why drunkenness was not known was because they had the power of making the laws in their own, hands, and the laws of men aided the commandments of God, and there the law was that no spirituous liquors of any kind should be introduced, excepting it was kept in the medicine chest of the missionary. (Cheers.) Thus it was they were preserved in a great measure from other sins because the main object of desire was cut off, and seamen did not care to visit the place when they knew there were not the means of intoxication. Although he did not endorse all that had been said about them, he thought the people remarkable for honesty and sobriety, and approaching as closely to a state of innocence as any other community they could find. He had spoken of the seeming failure of the work in New Zealand. He had to tell them plainly of one of its causes. The people of the • New Zealand race stood out for many years against the temptations to intoxication. In the statistical statement published in town of Wellington, many years after the settlement was formed, after describing a number of convictions for various offences, including the offence of drunkenness, there was a footnote added, to the effect that intoxication was almost nnknown among the native people. He could not say it was so now. But if the native people of New Zealand had given way to the sin of intoxication, from whom would God require an account of their sin ? It was not a sin of native growth; it was an imported, an exotic sin. They stood against it for a time, but as their faith failed they gave way to the temptations forced upon them by their English brethern (hear, hear.) They had heard it said (and they were fearful words) that it was the law of nature that the colored races should should melt away before the advance of civilisation. He would tell them where that law was registered and who were their agents. It was registered in hell, and its agents were those whom Satan made twofold more the children of hell than himself. (Cheers.) He from the bottom of his heart urged them to do all the could to discountenance the use of spirituous liquors. He said nothing for or against pledges to be signed, or any human covenants which might have been binding upon thfe conscience of a man in his unregenerate state; one remedy might be good for one man and one another, hut the one great remedy for all sin, as they had often heard in that town from Canon Stowell—(cheers)—was to pray to God to give them a new heart.