Page 8 - Bulletin 3 1999

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Canterbury, assisted by the Bishops of London, Winchester, Gloucester, Chichester, and

Lichfield. It was noted as a remarkable thing that during the Communion Service the Kyrie,
Gloria and Sanctus were sung in the Abbey for the first time since 1761 (The Church

Chronicle.) The sermon was preached by the Bishop of London, who took for his text the 7th
verse of the 21st chapter of St. John: “Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto

Peter. It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher’s
coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea.” (The Times,

Wednesday, June 30, 1847.)

Gray embarked with his family aboard the ship Persia, bound for the Cape, in December

1847, and arrived in Cape Town, on 20 February 1848. It was Septuagesima Sunday, the
third Sunday before Lent. The Epistle ordered to be read for the day was 1 Corinthians 9: 24:

“Know ye not, that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that

ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things: now

they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we are incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as
uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it

into subjection, lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a
cast-away.”

When he arrived at the Cape he found in the whole area for which he was responsible some
thirteen clergy, “for the most part colonial chaplains with one or two military chaplains,

most of them dispirited and ineffective and rather indolent, and one of his most urgent tasks
was that of building up a vigorous body of clergy to shepherd members of the Church who

had for so long been neglected, as well as to begin evangelizing the vast multitude still
untouched by the Gospel. With characteristic energy, Robert Gray put his hand to this task

and ten years later, by which time his vast diocese had been sub-divided by the creation of

new Sees at Grahamstown and in Natal, there were eighty clergy at work in the three
dioceses, while in 1861 when St. Helena and the Orange Free State had come to have

Bishops of their own, there were over one hundred clergy in the whole Province. … [In]
1870, two years before Gray’s death, there were 45 priests in the Diocese of Cape Town

alone …” (Hunter, p. 5.)