LIFE OF SACRIFICE

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1935, Page 6

LIFE OF SACRIFICE

BISHOP OF THE BUSH. DR. HALFORD’S ROVING WAYS. It was characteristic of Bishop G. D. Halford that he should speak, in his sermon to newly-ordained deacons of the Church of England in Brisbane recently, on the subject of sacrifice. He emphasised that sacrifice was the characteristic of Christ and His Church. What he might have added, says the Courier-Mail, was that sacrifice was characteristic of his own life, too.

Bishop Halford is now nearing his 70th year, and he spends his time, not in the comfortable surroundings that his years and his labours might have given him, but along the highways and by-ways of Central Queensland, among the settlers and the road-builders and the navvies. His tall, slim figure, his silver head, sun-tanned cheeks and ringing voice are more familiar in the unfrequented by-ways outback than in the cathedrals and churches of the cities. He prefers that it should be so. It is the life of his own seeking. . The son of a Hammersmith doctor of medicine, G. D. Halford went to Oxford, where he became a master of arts and doctor of divinity. After a few years in England in the service of the church he came out to Queensland, where the work of the Bush Brotherhood had a strong appeal for a man fired with a great enthusiasm. Longreach and Mitchell and the small towns knew him before he became archdeacon, and later, in 1909, bishop of Rockhampton. The bishop resigned in 1920, went to England to seek recruits for his Queensland Order of Witness, and returned with a small band of followers a few montlis later. When these returned to England he kept his pioneering work going.

It is noteworthy that Bishop Halford is a man of wide culture, an art and music critic—a man equally at home in the art galleries of the big cities as ; n the camps of the navvies along the line. It is when he speaks that the ’ of the true missionary is evident, for he likes the direct sermon—the chance to appeal directly to the great hearts of the people. He returned the other day to his work in Central Queensland.