COMMEMORATION SERVICE

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28159, 24 December 1956, Page 7

COMMEMORATION SERVICE

BISHOP HARPER’S INSTALLATION

The founding of the Diocese of Christchurch was recalled last evening by the Bishop of Christchurch (the Rt. Rev. A. K. Warren) at a special service to commemorate the installation of Bishop Harper in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels. Of the Rt. Rev. H. J. C. Harper, the first Bishop of Christchurch, Bishop Warren said “he saw visions and dreamed dreams, but always had his feet on the ground,” Bishop Harper was installed on Christmas Day, 1856, in a chair in the V-hut which was then St. Michael’s Church.

“It was a simple ceremony,” said Bishop Warren, “followed by the normal Christmas Day service. People had come from far and wide for the double purpose of celebrating Christmas and seeing their new bishop installed.”

Bishop Harper, he said, was physically fitted for colonial life by the stern life of self-discipline he had led since he was a boy brought up near Portsmouth. “Swimming was second nature to him, so that later when he had to swim rivers with his clothes tied to his head, in order to visit people, he thought nothing of it.” “He was spiritually fitted for the new life,” said Bishop Warren, “in that during this time as a tutor and chaplain at Eton he had influenced a whole generation of young men to the Christian way of life.” It was a triumph of inspiration to lead people to build a cathedral for 1100 people when there were only that number of families to do it,” Bishop Warren said.

“He was humanly fitted for his pioneering task for he had the friendliest approach to all sorts and conditions of men. He was as much at home preaching with the bar of an hotel in Hokitika as a pulpit as he was later in the pulpit of his cathedral.”