Page:Handbook of Western Australia.djvu/156

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138
Western Australia.

Upon Bishop Hale's translation to Brisbane, Dr. Henry H. Parry, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxon, for several years coadjutor Bishop of Barbadoes, was appointed to the See of Perth. During the short period of his administration, the affairs of the Church have received a great impulse. The Clergy have been considerably increased in number; grants have been made by the Parent Church Societies at home to meet our necessities, and a foundation laid by the generosity of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge towards the training of a native Ministry. The Church serving as a Cathedral is now condemned as unworthy of the noble purposes which a Cathedral is designed to discharge, and the erection of a handsome Parish Church, a more suitsble and the only available representative of what we want, has been resolved upon. Towards its erection between £5000 and £6000 have been raised, (part of it conditionally) in the Colony, while the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has given £500 to this object. The erection of the material edifice will be accompanied by measures for establishing a small staff of Clergy in the capital, who shall personally carry out to the outlying districts fer and near the evidence of that central power and energy which the Mother Church is designed more silently to express.

In the furtherance of religious education, the disused Collegiate School-house is to be opened as a boarding house for the children of churchmen, feeding a secular High School established by the Government, while it honors and cherishes the first principles of our faith.

A scheme is also maturing by the Bishop for a dutiful, voluntary taxation of all classes of adult church-people in all parts of the diocese. Diligent