Untitled - Electric Scotland

i866-68] CONSECRATION AT CAPETOWN 395
concerned, we have expressed them a hundred times over, and
I am only glad that we have opportunity of expressing them
1
again."
The Bishop of Capetown was present during these
debates, and was very far from satisfied with the conclu
sion arrived at :-
"It is not what I should have prepared," he writes, and is,
I think, a feeble production, but it saves the Church of England
from complicity with heresy."
On October loth he left England, after bitterly re
proaching the Government for the lack of support accorded
to him, and on January 25th, 1869, a few weeks after
Mr. Macrorie was
Bishop Tait s accession to the Primacy,
consecrated in the Cathedral of Capetown, where no Royal
Mandate or Licence was required, and became respon
sible, as Bishop of Maritzburg, for the charge of what
"
widowed
"
diocese of
Bishop Gray had termed the
Natal.
The seven years controversy was thus ended for a time,
so far as the Home Church was concerned. To some it
may appear that the issues which had been at stake were
of a local and temporary, perhaps even of a personal, charracter.
Such had never been Bishop Tait s opinion. He
saw, or thought he saw, in Bishop Gray s action,
if it
should receive the support of the authorities at home, a
very grave peril. Large sums of money had been given
for the endowment of Colonial Churches on the under
standing, hitherto undisputed, that the doctrinal and dis
ciplinary system of the Mother Church of England
should be observed (so far as legal conditions allowed of
1 Chronicle of Convocation, July I, 1868, pp. 1404-1408. The resolutions
carried in the Upper House were as follows: i. That the Report of the
Committee be adopted and communicated to the Lower House ; 2. That the
remarks thereon of the Lord Bishop of London be also sent to the Lower
House.