ARCHBISHOP REDWOOD IN AMERICA

New Zealand Tablet, 17 June 1915, Page 45

ARCHBISHOP REDWOOD IN AMERICA

On Monday, May 3, his Grace Archbishop Redwood, of New Zealand, was the honored guest of St. Thomas’ College (says the Catholic Bulletin of St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A.). He inspected with kindly interest the two new buildings completed since his last visit, reviewed the corps of cadets, chatted with the professors after luncheon, and gave the student body an instructive and delightful lecture on New Zealand. His Grace invested his subject with a halo of romance as he spoke of the days of the early navigators in southern seas, and traced the strange, stirring memories of those hazardous times yet living on in the names of capes and bays and hills. He depicted New Zealand as the wonderland of the- world. He drew a picture of its snow-capped peaks and lovely valleys, its woods and lakes, its glaciers and fiords. He spoke of a vast and varied flora in which every tree is an evergreen : of a fauna that, in days when Nature revelled in building on a huge scale, comprised birds as large as oxen, and of wingless birds, survivals of a strange past, now verging to extinction.

Touching on the social conditions of his country, his Grace described it as a land where none are very rich and none are very poor, and where the industrial problems that vex older nations have been solved to the satisfaction of all classes. The Maoris furnished a picturesque topic, and all heard with some astonishment that these primitive tribes, notorious not so long ago for their cannibalism, now send their own representatives to the Dominion Parliament. It was these same Maoris who attracted the first missionaries to New Zealand in days when whalers and seahunters were the only white men who touched at the shores of that country. Indulging for a moment in personal reminiscences, his Grace told how sixty-one years ago. when he was fifteen years of age, he set out for Europe in a passing brig of a few hundred tons; and how he returned as Bishop to the country he had left as a boy. The novelty of the whole theme, the rare grace with which the story was told, and the charming personality of the speaker,- will fix forever in the minds of the students of St. Thomas’ the visit -of his Grace Archbishop Redwood.