'In truth, the carrying out of the principle of the equality of black and white in a missionary work, which is the principle of this mission, is very difficult, and cannot be done in all particulars in practice by anyone, and by most people, unless brought up to it, probably not at all. Nevertheless, it is practicable, and, as we think, essential, and was in all main points carried out by Bishop Patteson. But the effect of this must not be exaggerated. It is true that we have no servants, yet a boy regularly brought water, for the Bishop, and a woman regularly swept and cleaned his rooms, and received regular wages for it. The Bishop never cooked his dinner or did any such work except upon occasions on which a bachelor curate in England does much of the kind, as a matter of course. The extraordinary thing is that it is, as he at any rate supposed, the custom in other missions to make scholars and converts servants as a matter of course; and the difference lies not in the work which is done or not done by the one party or the other, but in the social relation of equality which subsists between them, and the spirit in which the work is asked for and rendered.
'The main thing to notice about the Bishop is that there was nothing forced or unnatural in his manner of taking a position of equality, and equality as real in any way as his superiority in another. Consequently, there was never the least loss of dignity or authority on his part.
'There never was visible the smallest diminution of freedom and affection in the intercourse that went on. It required some knowledge in one respect to appreciate the extraordinary facility with which he conversed with boys from various islands. A stranger would be struck with his bright smiles and sweet tones as he would address some little stranger who came into his room; but one who knew a little of the languages alone could know with what extraordinary quickness he passed from one language to another, talking to many boys in their own language, but accommodating his tongue with wonderful readiness to each in succession. It would be hard to say how many languages he could speak; those which he spoke quite freely, to my knowledge, were not so many: Mota, Bauro, Mahaga, and Nengone, certainly; some others no doubt quite readily when among the people who spoke them; and very many only with a small vocabulary which was every instant being enlarged. It does not appear to me that his scientific philological acquirements were extraordinary; but that his memory for words giving him such a command of vocabulary, and so wide a scope for comparison, and his accurate and delicate ear to catch the sounds, and power of reproducing them, were altogether wonderful and very rarely equalled. A man of his faculty of expression and powers of mind could not speak like a native; he spoke better than a native, than a native of Mota at least. That is that, although no doubt he never was quite master of the little delicate points of Mota scholarship, which no one not a native can keep quite right, and no native can account for, yet his vocabulary was so large and accurate, and his feeling of the native ways of looking at things and representing them in words so true, that he spoke to them more clearly and forcibly than even any native spoke, and with the power of an educated mind controlling while following the native taste. He was an enthusiast, no doubt, about these languages, and jealous of their claim to be considered true language, and not what people suppose them to be, the uncouth jargon of savages. I will only say that his translations of some of the Psalms into Mota are as lofty in their diction and as harmonious in their rhythm, in my estimation, as anything almost I read in any language. This no doubt sounds exaggerated, and must be taken only for what it is worth.
'It was probably in a great measure because his natural power of acquiring languages was so extraordinary, and needed so very little labour in him, that he did so very little to put on paper what he knew of all those many tongues. All there is in print I have put together. Besides this, he carried the same unfortunate way of leaving off what he had begun into these notes on language also. In the year '63-'64 he got printed a number of small grammatical papers in almost all the languages he knew, because he felt he ought not to subject them to the risk of being lost. Another reason why he did not go into any laborious manuscript or printing work with the various languages was, that he saw as time went on, first, that it was so very uncertain what language would come in practice into request; and, secondly, that one language would suffice for the use, in practice, of all natives of a neighbourhood. For example, the language of part of Mae (Three Hills), in the New Hebrides, was once studied and well known. Nothing whatever came of the intercourse with that island, once so constant, I don't know why, and now the people themselves are destroyed almost, and hopes of doing them good destroyed by the slave trade. And, secondly, the use of the Mota language in our ordinary intercourse here has very much diminished the need for any one's knowing a particular language beyond the missionary who has charge of the boys who speak it. Thus the Bishop rather handed over the language of Bauro to Mr. Atkin, of Florida to Mr. Brooke, of Leper's Island to Mr. Price; and as the common teaching of all boys who belonged to either of the principal groups into which the school fell went on in Mota, there was no practical use in the other tongues the Bishop knew, except in his voyages, and in giving him more effectual powers of influencing those to whom he could speak in their own tongue. Besides, he saw so clearly the great advantage, on the one hand, of throwing together in every possible way the boys from all the islands, which was much helped by the use of one language, and, on the other hand, the natural tendency in a group of boys from one island or neighbourhood to keep separate, and of the teacher of a particular set to keep them separate with himself, that, without saying much about it, he discouraged the printing of other languages besides Mota, and in other ways kept them rather in the background. How things would have arranged themselves if Mota had not by circumstances come into such prominence I cannot say, but the predominance of Mota came in with the internal organisation of the Mission by Mr. Pritt. It is impossible for one who knew Bishop Patteson intimately, and the later condition of the Mission intimately, to lose sight for long of Mr. Pritt's influence and his useful work.'
Perhaps this chapter can best be completed by the external testimony of a visitor to Norfolk Island, given in a letter to the Editor of the 'Australian Churchman':-
'Daily at 7 A.M. the bell rings for chapel about one minute, and all hands promptly repair thither. In spite of the vast varieties of language and dialect spoken by fifty or sixty human beings, collected from twenty or thirty islets of the Pacific main, no practical difficulty has been found in using the Mota as the general language in Chapel and school, so that in a short time a congregation of twenty languages are able to join in worship in the one Mota tongue, more or less akin to all the rest, and a class of, say, nine boys, speaking by nature five different languages, easily join in using the one Mota language, just as a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, a Pole, an Italian, and an Englishman, all meeting in the same cafe or railway carriage, on the same glacier or mountain top, might harmoniously agree to use the French language as their medium of communication. So the service is conducted in Mota with one exception only. The collect for the day is read in English, as a brief allowable concession to the ears and hearts of the English members of the Mission. The service consists of the greater part of the Church of England Service translated. Some modifications have been made to suit the course of religious instruction. The Psalms are chanted and hymns sung in parts, and always in admirable tune, by the congregation. Noteworthy are the perfect attention, the reverent attitude, the hearty swing and unison of the little congregation, a lesson, I felt with shame, to many of our white congregations.