PIONEER MISSIONARIES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3169, 21 April 1909, Page 7

PIONEER MISSIONARIES.

EARLY DAYS IN THE SOUTH ISLAND. In the "Brighton Monthly Magazine" (an Anglican Church paper) the writer of an article on the early days of the Churches in Canterbury, remarks: It must not be supposed that the clergy of the Churh of England were the first to minister to the spiritual wants of the scattered settlers in the Middle Island of New Zealand. Long before they arrived two priests of the Roman Catholic Church traversed the then dreary plains, visiting the whaling settlers, and amid toil, hardship, and frequent risk of life, pursued their missionary wurk almost without reward, except such as they received in the shape of the friendship, kind offices, and grateful blessings of those to whom they ministered. A stretch of country, roughly speaking, of five hundred miles in length and two hundred miles in width, intersected by many dangerous rivers, divided by almost impassible mountain ranges, whose snowcapped peaks, beautiful to the eye, must have suggested deathin fearful form to the intrepid missionaries, was the scene of tne faithful works of the Rev. Fathers Seon and Chataigner. Or. the bare plains of Canterbury, with its Hurunui, Rakaia, Ashburton, and Raneitata Rivers, ' which before settlement had progressed were noted as the graves of hundreds of our settlers, across the dividing ranges of the Southern Alps, through the bleak and mountainous regions of Otago, which were almost unexplored till the excitement of the gold diggings caused diggers to force their way into the recesses of the West Coast of the island, where even now the heavily and closely-timbered country is difficult to penetrate. These two men laboured, beloved alike by Catholic or Potestant, Church of England or Presbyterian, gentle or simple. In those early days they asked no questions as to a man's or a woman's creed before rendering the help that was needed, or giving the kind word of encouragement to the sorely troubled.