Page 10 - Bulletin 3 1999

7

Endowment of the See

“[During] his first Visitation of his diocese in 1848, he saw no church building the whole

way between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. A few churches had already been erected in the
Eastern Province, as he later learned, but in very many towns or dorps to which he came he

found church people anxious to have a church where the Services of the Prayer Book, which

some of them had not heard for as long as twenty or thirty years, might be held, and they all
looked to their newly arrived Bishop for help in procuring a church and a pastor as well.

Before leaving England, Gray raised a considerable sum of money for the work of the Church
in South Africa (he continued to do this, and it has been reckoned that, during his episcopate,

he must have raised over £130,000 by his own personal efforts), so that in many cases he was
in a position to give something towards the cost of building a church, and to promise

something also towards the stipend of the priest he undertook to try to send. But one thing he

constantly stressed was, that church people must be prepared to help themselves. ‘I have
already sought to impress on you’, he wrote in one of his early Pastoral Letters, ‘that the

Church must, if it would take root in this land, depend mainly on its own exertions’, and
people responded to the challenge with the result that in a very few years, in place after

place, churches began to spring up, built very often according to plans drawn by Mrs. Gray.”

(Hunter, p. 6.)

“When he first arrived at the Cape, he was shocked to discover that, in certain parochial day
schools at Wynberg supposedly conducted under Church auspices, no specifically Christian

doctrine was allowed to be taught, and that even prayer was forbidden in the schools, while
in the Sunday Schools held in St. George’s [in Cape Town], the Church Catechism was not

taught, but, instead a truncated and often contradictory version of it was used.” (Hunter, p.

7.)

“The Church of the Province has always been much concerned with [Christian education],
from Bishop Gray’s day onwards, and its record in this field is a proud one. Besides

‘Bishops’, St. Cyprian’s and St. George’s Grammar School, all of which owe their existence