THE GOOD SHEPHERD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 13

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

DO NOUGHT WITHOUT A BISHOP, by Barbara Griffiths; Timaru Herald "Co. Ltd. BISHOP JULIUS has spoken of how, on first arriving in Canterbury, he listened to a eulogy of his predecessor which ended with the words, "Now he really was a bishop." The empahsis was not misplaced. Henry John Chitty Harper had estabiished a reputation that might well intimidate a successor. Having persuaded a fellow tutor at Eton, George Augustus Selwyn by name, to renounce law in favour of the Church, Harper was himself persuaded by Selwyn many years later to accept the newly-established see of Christchurch. At the time of sailing for New Zealand, Harper was a married man with 14 children, but neither advancing age nor the cares of domesticity could check his tireless enterprise. "Always the vicar at heart,’ he explored his vast diocese to its farthest limits, travelling on horseback or on foot, to be greeted often enough with the words, "Well, my Lord, you are the first clergyman we have seen here." When he resigned in 1889 at the age of 85 the whole of his diocese was supplied with churches and parsonages; its clergy had grown in number from 10 to 60. A clan of nearly one hundred descendants mourned the bishop’s death four years later. There is nothing sensational about this story of a career of unbroken success which Mrs Griffiths tells in a quiet, restrained style suitable to its character. It has been her aim, I imagine, to present the bishop as a good rather than a great man, caring much . for duty but little for ambition, and this is the impression she succeeds in conveying. Her documentary material has been used to good advantage, especially the letters of Charles Torlesse and Bishop Harper himself.

R. M.

Burdon