What Selwyn's own feeling on this matter might be, it is not easy to discover. But as, in their conversations at Lyttelton, he and Mr. Godley always found themselves in agreement, it seems not unlikely that on this point also the minds of the two men were in accord. But the bishop could not do as he would in this as in many other matters. The Committee of the C.M.S. had already taken alarm at a step which seemed likely to separate the colonial Church from that of the Mother Country, and they sent out instructions to their missionaries forbidding them to take part in the proposed convention.[10] This was one of the reasons which prompted the visit of the bishop to England in 1854. Before he set sail, however, he had called meetings in all the different centres of population; at these meetings he had laid his scheme before the Church, and he had carefully codified the criticisms which were offered. In most localities the draft was accepted as it stood. Auckland seems to have devised the idea of uniting bishop, clergy, and laity in one chamber. Christchurch had lost its man of insight through Godley's departure, and it now swung round into a merely conservative position. It joined with the rest of the settlements in insisting upon the principle of the Grey scheme, by which the Prayer Book and Authorised Version of the Bible were declared to be outside the powers of any New Zealand synod.
[10] Even as late as the year 1866 the Secretary of the C.M.S. (the Rev. Henry Venn) could write out to New Zealand: "If all the colonial churches are to be made free, the Church of England would be ruined as a missionary church. The people of England would never send out missionaries to be under Free Bishops."
The disappearance of Godley, with his visions of independence, made the task of the bishop more easy when he confronted the Committee of the Church Missionary Society. He was able to assure these cautious men as to the inoffensive character of his proposals. "The Committee now understood," writes their historian, Dr. Eugene Stock, "that no separation from the Church of England was intended; that the Queen's supremacy was recognised; that questions of doctrine and ritual would be excluded from the purview of the synods; and that the interests of the Maori Christians would be cared for." They accordingly withdrew their former instructions, and now signified their approval of the missionaries joining with the bishop in the proposed organisation of the Church.