3 October 1809 A.D. Robert Gray—1st Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa
3
October 1809 A.D. Robert
Gray—1st Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa
Robert Gray (1809 to 1872)
Church of England
South African Gray.
Birth of Robert Gray who became a notable missionary to South Africa and
the first Anglican bishop of Cape Town. He served as Metropolitan of South
Africa from 1853 until the year of his death in 1872.
3
October 1809 A.D. Robert
Gray Born—1st Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa
Day, E. Hermitage. “Robert Gray: First Bishop of Cape Town.”
Project Canterbury. 1930.
http://anglicanhistory.org/africa/day_gray.html. Accessed 26 May 2014.
Robert
Gray: First Bishop of Cape Town
by E. Hermitage Day
by E. Hermitage Day
London:
SPCK, 1930. 32 pp.
ROBERT
GRAY
A FEW days before the
Christmas of 1848 a travelling-waggon drew up before the inn at Stellenbosch,
thirty miles from Cape Town. Its body was dented and roughly patched, its
wheels tied up with ropes; the baggage which it contained was worn into holes.
From it there stepped a clergyman in a battered hat and rent boots. The first
Bishop of Cape Town had returned from the first Visitation of his diocese. It
had been a new experience for an Anglican bishop to swim rivers, to put his
shoulders to the waggon-wheel, to pitch tents and hew wood and groom the
horses. About that time an English writer had pointed the contrast between the
Roman Catholic Dr. Griffiths, Vicar Apostolic of the London district, and the
Anglican bishops of that day: "A very pleasing, venerable,
episcopal-looking man, very like any other bishop save that none of ours would
touch a carpet-bag with his little finger." But Robert Gray was a founder
of a new tradition of episcopal life and work. With the old tradition he was
perfectly familiar; he had gone up to Oxford in the year that his father was
consecrated to the See of Bristol. The Bishop of Bristol was a man of character
and courage; he had gone calmly to service in the cathedral while the rioters
of 1831 were in possession of the city, and a few hours later his palace was
burned to the ground. Throughout his life Robert Gray showed an equal calmness
and courage, and he had continual need of it.
His youth and early
manhood were gravely hampered by ill-health. But he was an unwearying student,
and though he could take no honours at Oxford, he learned much there and from
continental travel. He was ordained in 1833, and in the following year became
vicar of Whitworth, co. Durham, spending himself unreservedly on a difficult
and scattered parish, yet finding time for eight hours a day of reading and
writing. The rise of the Oxford Movement, and the publication of the
"Tracts for the Times," confirmed him in the theological and
historical position at which he had arrived independently, and in the ideals of
parochial work which he had set before himself.
In 1845 he was
collated by the Bishop of Durham, who had formed a high opinion of Mr. Gray's
work, to the vicarage of Stockton-on-Tees, and to an honorary canonry in the
cathedral church. Eighteen months later he was offered the See of Cape Town,
one of those which the munificence of Miss (afterwards Baroness) Burdett-Coutts
had founded. He had already done good service for the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel; the missionary spirit was strong within him; and he
replied to the Archbishop of Canterbury that to decline the offer would seem to
him a shrinking from the call of God, and that he readily and cheerfully placed
himself at the disposal of the Church. He was consecrated on St. Peter's Day,
1847, together with the first Bishops of Melbourne (Perry), Adelaide (Short), and
Newcastle, N.S.W. (Tyrrell). Months of arduous work on behalf of the new
diocese preceded his sailing at the end of the year.
There had been a
suggestion that the new see should be placed at Grahamstown, where the English
population was relatively stronger. In Cape Town the feeble congregations of
the English Church were nominally under the oversight of the Bishop of
Calcutta, and successive prelates had landed on their way to India to perform a
few episcopal acts. The few clergymen of the Colony were colonial chaplains;
none of them lived in Cape Town. The Church of St. George, Cape Town, had been
built under the authority of an Ordinance, by shareholders of whom some were
Jews and others atheists; its foundation-stone
had been laid with no more than Masonic ceremonial; those who rented its
pews heard from its pulpit denunciations of the doctrines of the Church.
Churchmen were far outnumbered by the Dutch Reformed Church, and by contending
sects representing several divisions of English and Scottish Protestantism. The
Bishop was undismayed. He began at once to plan for the future.
Robert Gray was then
but thirty-nine. But on the young shoulders was an old head. The letters
written during the first six months in South Africa show how quickly and surely
he mastered the facts, the conditions, the problems of the work that lay before
him. They would have daunted at the outset any man of less courage and faith.
The diocese stretched for six hundred miles from west to east; it was necessary
to organize the whole work from one corner of the vast area. There was then,
and for fifteen years afterwards, not a mile of railway track in the Colony;
the roads were mere tracks, possible only to horses and slowly moving
ox-waggons. Over the 277,000 square miles of territory were dotted isolated
families and little groups of Church people, whom the Church had almost wholly
neglected. Many of them had clung to the tradition of Churchmanship in spite of
every discouragement; no sooner had the Bishop arrived than he began to receive
piteous appeals for priests, and promises to build little churches and schools
if only they could be served. The Bishop reckoned that fifty priests would be
none too many to meet the most pressing needs; he had but seventeen, few of
them his own choice, some unsatisfactory. In Kaffraria there were more than
five thousand troops without a single chaplain; in Natal eight hundred settlers
with no clergyman within two hundred miles of them. Beyond the scattered Church
people, who were the first care, lay an almost untouched mission-field. In and
about Cape Town was a great number of Mohammedans, in part the descendants of
the Malays whom the Dutch had brought from their East Indian Colonies, in part
liberated African slaves; and even settlers were found to be lapsing to Islam.
Large groups of coloured people, Eurafricans of mixed race, were found in and
about the towns and villages. The native tribes, as yet unsubdued by arms, and
constituting a continual menace to the more distant parts of the Colony, had only
been touched here and there by Christian missionaries, Moravian, Rhenish,
Wesleyan, and French; and of these some had lost their first zeal and become
little more than traders, grown rich by trafficking with the natives.
So much of the
problem the Bishop had realized before he set out on his first Visitation.
Everything relating to religion, he said, whether in the Church or out of it,
was in confusion and disorder. There were encouragements in face of all
difficulties. The Bishop found the Government well disposed to his work, and
willing to make considerable grants to it. He bought for his residence the old
estate of Protea, of three hundred acres, five miles from the centre of Cape
Town, and his successors in the see have had good reason to admire his
foresight. Protea, soon to be renamed Bishopscourt, had been the farm of van
Riebeek, the first Dutch Governor of the Cape. It lies on a lower slope of
Table Mountain, deep in woodland, watered by a stream, surrounded now by one of
the most beautiful gardens in all South Africa. Here, in the roomy old house,
the Bishop found occasional quiet for himself and room for the many visitors
who came and went on the business of the diocese. Here, in the first months of
his residence, he was already training men for Holy Orders; the old
slave-quarters became a school. Here the first plans were made for missions to
the Mohammedans and the heathen, for educational foundations, for the planting
of clergy at strategic points, for the raising of St. George's Church, now
become the cathedral, from its low estate.
The first winter was
coming to its end when the Bishop set out on his first Visitation. His Journal
records from point to point of the five months' trek the discovery of little
groups of English Churchpeople, of kindly English hosts in lonely homesteads
where services could be held, and Communion given, and Baptism and Confirmation
administered. At Port Elizabeth, after travelling nine hundred miles, he found
the first English church he had seen since leaving Cape Town. There were little
schools to be visited, and sites to be chosen for churches, for which Mrs. Gray
at Protea was making plans and working-drawings, with a skill which we can
admire even today. Everywhere the Bishop found a welcome from some who rejoiced
that at long last they had the oversight of a Father in God.
Yet there are sad
things also set down in the Journal or recorded in private letters home. The
colonial chaplains were without pastoral or missionary zeal; "they have no
opportunities of seeing one another, and stirring up one another to their
duties, and sink in consequence into dull, apathetic officials." There
were not a few quarrels to be composed; and everywhere the Bishop saw the
grievous consequences of long neglect, in the lapsing of Churchpeople to the
sects or to indifference. Yet, wearied though he was with rough travel and
coarse fare, weighed down with anxiety about the financing of so great a work
as the organization of the diocese promised to be, the Bishop could write with
great cheerfulness, and thank God for the consolations of the journey. If in
one place he found a lady who said that in thirty-eight years she had seen no
minister of her own Church, he found there also a little congregation of
Church-people who had met every Sunday to read the Church service together;
without ministry and without sacraments they had yet maintained the spirit of
common worship.
The Bishop reached
home just before Christmas. He had travelled three thousand miles, confirmed
nine hundred persons, and ordained one or two to the sacred ministry. He had
judged for himself the greatness of the task, and with an equal courage had
planned the doing of it. He trusted the Church at home to see that he was not
left without men and means to meet the expectations and hopes his visit had
everywhere aroused.
That toilsome journey
was but the first of many; visitation succeeded visitation at short intervals.
St. Helena lay then within the Diocese of Cape Town, and he had to go there, to
minister to a small flock, to compose quarrels, to do something for the
thousands of liberated slaves landed on the island. It was something that on
his frequent voyages to England he was able to get time for reading and
thought, for in South Africa his time was continuously occupied with urgent
affairs. The shaping of the diocese was a tremendous task. He wanted men, but
not always the men whom the Colonial Office, or even the Church in England, was
anxious to send out to him. "There can be no greater mistake," he
writes, " than to suppose that inferior men will do for this Colony. The
clergy are, and will continue to be, one hundred to two hundred miles from each
other, and must be such as can be left to act alone, and be fair
representatives of the English Church in the presence of very respectable Dutch
ministers." He found that for want of such men laymen of education and
intelligence were everywhere resorting to the ministrations of the Dutch
Reformed Church and Wesleyans and Independents. Cares of all kinds, temporal
and spiritual, crowded in upon him, for there were few to whom he could
delegate even the simpler parts of his work. He looked back to the quiet
pastoral work of a parish priest in England as the happiest lot on earth.
Almost every letter
of that time speaks of the all but overwhelming weight of anxiety and work, yet
also of the confidence and perfect peace of the mind that is stayed on God.
Troubles within the Church were matched by jealousies and suspicions without;
almost every newspaper attacked the work of the awakening Church. Echoes of
ecclesiastical strife in England reached South Africa, and encouraged little
knots of malcontents. Anglo-Indians on holiday, members of strange sects, were
busy in opposition, leaving trouble when they went back to India.
But another
Visitation assured him of quiet progress and consolidation in distant parts of
the diocese. Within two years the number of the clergy had increased from
fourteen to forty-two, and some of them were men whom he had himself taught and
ordained. He had found that Churchmen were far more in number than he had
thought at first. More than twenty churches were being built. A collegiate
school, destined to grow to great things, and today the leading public school
in South Africa, was coming to the birth. In one respect the task might seem to
be eased; the Bishop found men whom he could trust as his lieutenants, one by
one. But the happy result of their work was a development which laid fresh
burdens upon the Bishop.
In 1850 the Bishop
was in Natal. A year before there had been no English clergyman to serve the
needs of the large and increasing white immigrant population and of the hundred
thousand Zulus lately added to the Colony, though there were foreign
missionaries owning no allegiance to the Government and opposed on principle to
the Church. The return to Cape Colony, over mountains pronounced to be all but
impassable, was full of dangers, and through a land devastated by the Kaffir
wars. The Bishop thought less of the perils than of the problem which his journey
had disclosed, that of nearly a million heathen within the diocese whom the
Church, alone among the twenty religious bodies in South Africa, had not begun
to evangelize. In letter after letter he wrote with characteristic humility of
his desire that "some really able man" should take his place, while
he himself went into Natal to start mission-work there. He was oppressed with
the sense of his own unfitness. Yet the bare record of fact shows that
everywhere the Church within the Colony was in a far different state from that
in which he had found it two years before; its whole work was being
consolidated, organized, inspired with a new energy.
Already, within three
years of its foundation, the diocese called for division. A visit to England
secured the stipends, and on St. Andrew's Day, 1853, John Armstrong and John
William Colenso were consecrated to the new Sees of Grahamstown and Natal. The
former, a man of apostolic faith and courage, was to die after less than three
years of devoted work; the latter was grievously to disappoint Gray's trust in
him.
From the first the
Bishop had planned the canonical organization of the Church in South Africa.
All his action had been taken in a firm belief in the Church as the Body of
Christ, spiritually independent of the State. The troubles of the Church in
England had confirmed his belief and his resolve. He delayed before summoning a
Synod of the diocese, for he had expected that the Imperial Parliament would
pass some Act which would give legal effect and validity to the acts of such a
Synod, but he had no doubt that without any such legislation its acts would
have canonical force. In 1856 the Secretary of State for the Colonies had
intimated to the Governor-General of Canada that the Government had abandoned
the idea of any Imperial legislation which might seem to interfere with the
legislature of Canada, and had expressed his conviction that the Church ought
herself to proceed to make her own rules for the management of Church affairs,
through representative bodies. The suggestion had already been acted upon in
Canada, and the Bishop of Cape Town announced that he would summon a Synod. Its
general principles had received the assent of the clergy and laity four years
earlier The Synod was to determine nothing without the assent of the three
orders; none but communicants could be delegates for the laity, all bona
fide members of the Church having a voice in their election; the standards
of faith and doctrine contained in the Prayer Book and Articles were to be
regarded as outside the range of the Synod's authority.
The Synod met in
January, 1857. The interest, even the external opposition, which it aroused was
proof of the new life stirring in the Church, which ten years before had been
treated as if it had no real existence. There was free and intelligent debate
on many subjects; and the Synod provided for ecclesiastical courts, the
appointment of bishops and of parish priests, and the tenure of Church
property. During a visit to England in the following year the Bishop gained
from the Government the assurance that no difficulty would be raised about the
consecration of missionary bishops for work beyond the British Dominions. That
made possible the consecration in Cape Town Cathedral, on January 1, 1861, of
Charles Frederick Mackenzie for work on the Zambesi, the beginning of the
Universities' Mission to Central Africa.
But the Bishop was
now faced by troubles of a new kind, beside that care of all the churches which
came upon him daily. Five parishes in the diocese had resisted the holding of
the Synod in 1857, refusing to send lay delegates. To a second Synod in 1861
the vicar of Mowbray again refused to come, or to give notice of it to his
parishioners. He had been a colonial chaplain, in deacon's orders, before the Bishop
came to the Colony, but had been ordained priest by him, and had taken the oath
of canonical obedience. He defended his attitude towards the Synod by alleging
that those who had taken part in the Synod of 1857 had " seceded from the
English Church." The Bishop saw that a principle was at stake, and that he
must act. He held a Court, his five assessors were unanimous in thinking that
contumacy should not go unpunished, and Mr. Long was suspended for three
months, though--by the Bishop's charity--without loss of stipend. Mr. Long
applied to the Supreme Court for an interdict to restrain the Bishop from
disturbing him in his church. The Bishop was his own counsel, defending his
action so clearly and cogently that judgment was given in his favour. But Mr. Long
appealed to the Privy Council, the judgment was upset, and Mr. Long was
reinstated. In several particulars the judgment was contrary to fact; for
example, the Court alleged that the assessors in the Bishop's Court had been
three clergymen chosen by himself and sharing his opinions; they were in fact
five chosen by the Synod, and Mr. Long had been asked whether he objected to
any of them. But time has amply vindicated the Bishop's action. The judgment of
the Privy Council, with many another affecting the Church, has passed into the
limbo of things forgotten; synodical government has now for two generations
assured to the Church in South Africa the freedom by which she lives.
But troubles far
graver were to come. The actions and words of the Bishop of Natal had from the
first been an anxiety; his "fine, generous, bold and noble
character," as Bishop Gray described it, had shown itself wanting in
caution and judgment. By 1861 he had thrown over the Church's doctrine of the
priesthood and the sacraments, denying that Holy Communion con-veyed any gift
which a Christian could not obtain for himself at any time. Recourse was had to
the Church in England. The Provincial Synod of Canterbury condemned Colenso's
work on the Pentateuch as "involving errors of the gravest and most
dangerous character." The English and Irish bishops, with such colonial
bishops as were then in England, were summoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury
to a solemn conference. As a result, Colenso was inhibited from officiating in
most of the English dioceses and forty-one bishops joined in calling upon him
to resign his see, expressing their opinion that proceedings should be taken
against him. It may be reasonably contended that since no proceedings had been
taken, they seemed to prejudge the case. But their action at least showed that
they would approve and support the Metropolitan of the South African Province
in citing the Bishop of Natal before him.
Complicated questions
arose as to the Letters Patent which gave Bishop Gray jurisdiction in the
Colony, a jurisdiction disputed by Colenso. The Bishop of Cape Town fell back
on his claim to spiritual jurisdiction as a Metropolitan, whatever the fate of
the challenged Letters Patent might be. To safeguard his action he summoned all
the members of his Provincial Synod to sit as his assessors in his Court, Court
and Synod thus being made to consist of the same persons. The Bishop of Natal
was charged with impugning the doctrines, amongst others, of Atonement,
Justification, Regeneration, Inspiration of Holy Scripture, the grace of the
Sacraments and the Hypostatic Union, and also with depraving the Book of Common
Prayer. The Court found Colenso guilty of the charges; the Provincial Synod
approved the judgment and sentence of the Metropolitan, and sentence of
deprivation was pronounced. The Synod also decreed that if the Bishop of Natal
should presume to act as a bishop within any part of the Province of Cape Town
after his deprivation and before restoration, he would be ipso facto
excommunicate, and that sentence of excommunication must be solemnly pronounced
against him. The sentence was pronounced in December, 1865. Bishop Gray had
throughout acted with so great a forbearance as even to incur criticism from
his brethren in England. When the first Lambeth Conference met in 1867
fifty-five of the eighty bishops present declared their acceptance of the
sentence pronounced on Dr. Colenso by the Metropolitan of South Africa and his
suffragans as being spiritually a valid sentence.
The vacant diocese of
Natal was filled by the consecration of W. K. Macrorie, with the title of
Bishop of Pietermaritzburg. Colenso still maintained a tiny schism, in which he
was abetted by the British naval and military authorities, who forbade the
forces in Natal to acknowledge the Bishop of Pietermaritzburg. He succeeded in
getting judgments in the Natal courts confirming him in the possession of the
endowments of the see and of Church property in Natal, hindering for many years
its use by the Church of the Province. But the great majority of clergy and
laity were faithful; the schism dwindled and died. Today time has healed the
old wounds; the great Colenso case which once convulsed Church and State is now
but dull matter for the historian.
The effect of the two
cases of Long and Colenso was to destroy the whole basis of the Royal supremacy
on which the Crown lawyers had at first attempted to build up the colonial
establishment. "Lord Westbury, with that clear precision of language for
which he was famous, indicated the lawyers' line of retreat: 'The Church of
England, in places where there is no Church established by law, is in the same
position with any other religious body, in no better but in no worse position,
and the members may adopt rules for enforcing discipline within their own
body.'"
Looking back, we see
that the Church of England and the English Courts were on their trial during
those troublous years, rather than the Church in South Africa. The judgments in
ecclesiastical cases were at that time likely to be judgments of policy rather
than of law, as Chief Baron Kelly admitted. The manifest inequity of the
judgment in the Natal property case, in which the Court assigned to Colenso the
property which Bishop Gray had himself bought and vested in himself, had shown
the Bishop that the less Churchmen had to do with the State Courts the better
chance they might have of justice. Nothing would induce him again to appear
before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
The Bishop's work was
done. He had lived to see the Church in South Africa constituted, built up,
secured against State interference. Twenty-five years of incessant labours and
anxiety had taken their toll of his strength. Long and arduous visitations of
the vast territory severely tried him; nor could he recuperate his strength
when at home, for his time was wholly occupied in the affairs of the diocese.
Finance had been always a heavy burden. Protracted law-suits had brought him
infinite sadness; that they issued in the triumphant vindication of the
Church's rights could not wholly compensate him for the physical and mental
strain of those harassing years. There had been frequent journeys to England,
where his time was filled with work, of other kinds but no less laborious. In
1871 Mrs. Gray died, the constant companion of his travels, the untiring
amanuensis and accountant, the skilful designer of churches, the brightness and
stay of his home life at Bishops-court. He worked on for a year in loneliness,
though with many encouragements from signs of progress in all that he had so
wisely planned. The end came swiftly. A fall from his horse, little heeded at
the moment, brought a sudden collapse. On September i, 1872, the great Bishop
passed to his rest and his reward. The people of Cape Town knew what manner of
man had been among them; to the burial at Claremont there came five thousand
mourners, of every rank and grade, of many creeds.
The achievement of
Bishop Gray has parallels in the work of other pioneer bishops overseas, but in
its extent and its quality it remains unsurpassed. The Church in South Africa
owes its freedom, its unity, its vitality, its extension, mainly to his wisdom
and foresight. Scarcely any plan that he made for it has had to be abandoned.
It has steadily pursued its way along the lines that he traced for it. The
formation of the Diocese of George so recently as 1911 was only the carrying
out of Bishop Gray's intention half a century before; it had been delayed only
by the alienation of the Church property in Natal. The alienation had necessitated
the diversion to Natal of funds destined for the new See of George; when the
Church's property was restored to her by one of the last acts of the Natal
Parliament before the Union of South Africa, the See of George was founded.
The Bishop's memorial
at Claremont speaks of him as having " with unceasing energy and in simple
faith built up under God the Church of this Province." It is natural to
regard that as the most important part of his work. He had seen the foundation
of the Dioceses of St. Helena, Grahamstown, Natal, Bloemfontein, and Zululand;
he was at the time of his death planning the formation of a diocese for the
Transvaal. He had organized the Province so wisely that the first provisions of
its constitution have been modified only in small details. Under that
constitution the Church has lived a free, wholesome life. But the diocese was
never neglected for the Province. The consolidation of old centres of work, the
foundation of new, the delimitation of parishes, the provision of churches, schools,
men, means, equipment generally, were normal parts of a work which went on
unceasingly. In addition, the Bishop founded at the Cape institutions which
served all South Africa. Among the first was Zonne-bloem, now within the city
of Cape Town, then a country estate on the slope of Table Mountain, overlooking
the Bay. There natives were to be instructed side by side with whites, not only
in letters but in crafts and industries; and from Zonnebloem a native ministry
was expected to issue in course of time. Zonnebloem has a fine record of varied
work; if it has not fulfilled all expectations it is largely because conditions
have changed, and work which it was founded to do has been transferred to other
centres.
Education was one of
the Bishop's first concerns; he was no sooner settled at Protea than he himself
began to teach. The old slave-quarters there saw the beginnings of the school
which has grow into the Diocesan College, colloquially known as
"Bishop's." Before a year was out the Bishop had bought an estate of
fifty acres at Rondebosch, nearer Cape Town, and moved the school there. The
need for itsoon outran the accommodation; from the moment of its inception to
the present day the school has taken a foremost share in the education of South
African boys, and has set a standard for emulation by others. The provision of
schools for girls was in the nature of things a work less easy for the Bishop
to plan. But in the last years of his episcopate St. Cyprian's was founded, to
become no less renowned than " Bishop's." It had long been in his
thoughts, the undertaking had been pressed upon him from several quarters, but
only in 1871 was it found practicable to begin work. St. Cyprian's was to be a
diocesan work. It was fortunate in its first head; it took at once a leading
place. In later years continuity has been assured by placing it under the care
of the All Saints Sisters, and it has done immense service to South African
womanhood. The lessons that have been learned there have borne good fruit in
lonely homesteads on the Karoo, and in the town and country life of the Cape.
It was natural that
the Bishop should hope for the work of religious communities in South Africa,
and ardently desire their aid in his immense task. The Synod of 1865 asked the
Bishop to invite some English sisterhood to establish a branch house for
penitentiary work. Three years later the Bishop founded St. George's Home, Cape
Town, not as a daughter-house of an English foundation, though Clewer was
greatly interested in it, but as an independent house. The members of the
Society were not under vows, but lived together under a light rule, rather as
deaconesses than sisters. Their house near the cathedral became at once the
centre of women's work in the diocese; they undertook many activities besides
that which had been their first aim, including the nursing in the city
hospital. It accomplished valuable work, but its constitution was too slight to
give it the stability of a community, and it yielded place to branch houses of
English sisterhoods as they found it possible to extend their work to South
Africa. There are now many of these in the Province, besides the indigenous
Communities of the Resurrection at Grahamstown and St. John the Divine in
Natal. For their work St. George's Home had prepared the way, by overcoming
prejudices and suspicions, initiating work, and bringing the Church to realize
that the work of religious communities is indispensable in regions where the
Church must for centuries to come be largely missionary.
The foundation of
sisterhoods had in England long preceded the revival of the religious life for
men. But before the Bishop died the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley,
had given promise of stability, under its founder Father Benson, and the Bishop
was in correspondence with Father Benson during the last year of his life, in
the hope that the Fathers might come to South Africa. It was at that time
impossible for the little community to send out a colony. It was then but five
years old, it had already some obligations to America, and was looking forward
to an Indian house. But Father Benson looked forward to a time when a South
African house might also be possible, though he did not think that it would be
for some time to come. That plan also has been accomplished. Father Benson kept
South Africa in mind. Not many years passed before he was able to fulfil the
Bishop's hope. The Society's house in the slums of Cape Town, with its many
dependencies for native work, and the mission station of St. Cuthbert's in the
Transkei, have given invaluable service to the Province, not only in the
mission-work for which the Fathers have been directly responsible, but in the
maintenance of spiritual life among the clergy, the communities, and layfolk.
To look for the
secret of great achievement is to find it in character. Robert Gray was one in
whom, by the grace of God, those three elements which von Hugel has insisted to
be necessary to ripeness and fullness of Christian living were held in balance.
The intellectual element, the institutional element, the mystical element were
evident and proportionate in him. He would have been the last man to claim for
himself any high degree of scholarship. But he read constantly and deeply in
all subjects which concerned his office and work, and was wise in judgment. So
he was able to bring to bear on that institutional work by which he is best
remembered the fruit of the Church's experience throughout the ages, the wisdom
of her theologians and canonists and moralists. But the intellectual and the
institutional were in him related at every point to the mystical. Love of God,
and of souls to be brought to God through His Church, was the driving force of
all his action.
Perhaps the most
remarkable characteristic was his simple humility. The pagan poet might reply
to his royal patron:
It is as thou hast
heard; in one short life I, Cleon, have effected all those things Thou
wonderingly dost enumerate.
The Bishop, looking
back over a work at which others marvelled, would only think "so little
done, so much remains to do." Again and again his private letters bear
witness to his distrust of himself, his sense of inadequacy to his post and his
opportunities. Some who looked on at the ecclesiastical conflicts into which he
was forced judged hastily that he was an overbearing man, eager to have his way
and impose his ideas, at whatever cost to others. They little knew at how great
a cost to himself he maintained orthodoxy and discipline and vindicated the
Church's right; how he suffered with those on whom he was compelled to pass
judgment. If here and there a concise letter seems to be wanting in sympathy,
it was because he himself had long ago made the sacrifices which now he asked
from others, calling them to duties which he had not declined. His heart was full
of tenderness to all; it showed itself in his compassion to the sick and
oppressed, his kindness to children and animals.
He longed for more
time for study and prayer. He seemed to himself at times to be leading merely a
busy, secularized life. Yet on a long day's journey he records with
thankfulness that he had been able to maintain almost uninterrupted communion
with God. At Bishops-court he would rise at five, to get time for prayer before
the business of the day began. For the work once begun would not cease till
nightfall, if then. The age was one which set a high standard of duty; the
Bishop never fell below the highest. If he scorned delights and lived laborious
days, duty, not fame, was his spur. Exercise was very necessary, to him; he
found it in walking and riding about his diocese. For long hours in every day
that he spent at home he was chained to his desk. Letter-writing was ever a
burden to him; but that could not be guessed from his correspondence, which,
whether it related to public or private affairs, was admirably full and clear.
A bishop today can dictate to a typist much of his routine correspondence;
Bishop Gray lived before such aid, nor perhaps would he have condescended to
it. We may think that he was somewhat too conscientious; we are content to
scribble "S.P.G.," the Bishop always wrote it in full, "the
Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel." History is the
gainer by his toil; we have in his letters and journals a record of the
development of the Church in South Africa, its trials and conflicts, the
conditions in which it worked, the state of the country, which constitutes as
ample material for the historian as exists in any Church of a Dominion.
When the Bishop died
the S.P.G., moved to a warmth of expression unwonted at that time recorded its
estimate of the service which he had given to the Church. "The seat of the
foremost prelate in the British Colonies is left vacant He has laid down the
burden of a work the greatness and completeness of which can hardly be over-estimated.
. . . Robert Gray was con secrated Bishop of Cape Town in 1847 There was then
in South Africa no Church organization fourteen isolated clergymen ministered
to scattered congregations. In the quarterof a century which has since elapsed
a vast ecclesiastical province has been created. There are now in South Africa
six dioceses. At the Provincial Synod of 1870 five of these were announced as
integral parts of the Province, being complete with synodical, parochial, and
missionary organizations, administered by one hundred and twenty-seven
clergymen, besides lay teachers The Society would record solemnly its
thankfulness to God for those great talents, the use of which was so long
granted to the Church. His single minded devotion of himself and his substance
to the work of God, his eminent administrative ability, his zeal which never
flagged, his considerate tenderness in dealing with others, his undaunted
courage in grappling with unexpected obstacles in the defence and confirmation
of the Gospel, will live in the records of the African Church as the qualities
of her founder, and will secure for him a place in history as one of the most
distinguished in that band of missionary Bishops by whose labours in this
generation the borders of the Church have been so widely extended."
No survey of Bishop
Gray's work would be complete which left out of account its reaction upon the
Church in England. There the Church went in subservience to the State, in dread
of the Privy Council. At any moment she might be the sport and the secret scorn
of cynical statesmen, and at times she seemed merely to echo their opinions; if
a Colonial Secretary presumed to decide whether or not a bishop was necessary
to a new mission, an archbishop would be found arguing that it was un-scriptural
for a bishop to head one. Bishop Gray's assertion of the Church's independence
and of her inherent powers encouraged all in England who were combining to
resist the intrusion of the civil power into the spiritual affairs of the
Church. His action made men ask themselves whether the Church was the Body of
Christ, or merely a department of the State, maintained, as Newman had said,
rather as a support to civil society than for the unseen and spiritual
blessings which are its true and proper gifts. South Africa showed England not
only that the Church could exist independently of the State, but that
independence was necessary to her life.
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