Charles PERRY

PERRY, CHARLES (b. London, England, 1807, d. Cambridge, England, 2 Dec 1891). First Anglican bishop of Melbourne.

A cool and rational thinker, and an uncompromising evangelical, Perry brought sound, analytical judgment to a colony where too often passion and partisanship determined policy. He laid the constitutional foundations of the Church of England in Vic, presided over a rapidly growing diocese, and facilitated the contribution of the laity to the life of the church. A severe personality limited the achievements of this ecclesiastical statesman of great ability. He meticulously observed proper legal procedures and was unfailingly courteous to his opponents. While his narrow churchmanship was often begrudged, his fairness was never challenged.

Son of a wealthy merchant and sheriff of Essex, Perry was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1828 1st cl hons mathematics (first place) and classics (seventh)). In 1832 he was appointed fellow and tutor at Trinity College. Unlike many who were to make their mark on the evangelical world, Perry during his undergraduate days avoided sitting at the feet of Charles Simeon at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. From 1829 to 1832 he struggled with religious doubt which left him with a deep sense of the duty of private judgment in matters of religion. On the basis of his own study of the Scriptures, he accepted the evangelical faith. Only then, through Edward Hoare and William Carus, Charles Simeon's successor at Holy Trinity, did he become enmeshed in the evangelical network, making special friendships with Thomas Fowell Buxton and Joseph John Gumey.

Priested by the bp of Ely in 1836, Perry was assistant curate of Christ Church, Barnwell and St Paul's, Newtown (both Cambridge parishes) and vicar of the latter from 1845. In 1841 he m. Frances (q.v. Frances Perry) a daughter of Samuel Cooper, a Hull merchant. Her brother John was a contemporary of Perry's at Trinity.

Perry was appointed bp of Melbourne on the recommendation of the secretary of state for the colonies who acted directly on the advice of Henry Venn, CMS secretary. Venn had been impressed by Perry's interest in pre-ordination training and in CMS. Perry was given the least promising diocese of the three then being created with government support to expand the influence and permanence of Church of England ministry among the residents of British colonies in the southern hemisphere. Adelaide and Cape Town took the £35 000 endowment of Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress of a wealthy banking family. Perry was consecrated bishop of Melbourne at Westminster Abbey on 29 June 1847 and arrived in Melbourne on 23 Jan 1848. The population of his diocese then numbered 43 000, nearly half of whom were Anglicans. The Melbourne church was staffed by a steady stream of Irish clergy, whom Perry credited with zeal and 'more or less of a wrong-headedness'. They were attracted to Vic by the praise which the Christian Examiner, a monthly magazine founded by evangelicals in Dublin in 1825, heaped on its 'truly apostolic' bishop. Perry relied greatly on H B Macartney (the elder) (q.v.) whom he had brought with him and, controversially, on lay readers. By 1853 Perry was clear on the qualities required in a colonial clergyman: soundness of doctrine, personal piety, a well-instructed mind, sincere zeal for God's glory plus a 'patient, persevering energy, a cheerful and contented disposition, firmness, self-possession, a meek temper, a frank and conciliatory manner, and great natural good sense'.

The discovery of gold in Vic completely transformed the colony and catapulted Perry into a key position in the Australian church. The Perrys had no children, allowing Frances to accompany her husband on his tours of the goldfields, where he preached in riding clothes, and she reassured the wives of clergy who were anxious about the bad influence which the goldfields might have on their children. Nevertheless, the Perrys were among those colonials who argued that Australian children were larrikins and that 'many pious parents' made a 'manifest failure' of disciplining their children. His journeys beyond the confines of polite society and his forthright opinions won him considerable public notoriety.

At the first conference of Australasian bishops at Sydney in 1850, Perry argued a view on infant baptism in sympathy with the Gorham judgment in England, which found that the denial of baptismal regeneration was not inconsistent with the doctrine of the Church of England. The five other bishops, with highchurch convictions, led by the aged W G Broughton of Sydney, were disconcerted by Perry's insistence on a different view, and were disappointed that they were unable to present a united view on what they regarded as a major issue of both doctrine and church-state relations. Perry offended Broughton again when he accepted into his diocese two Irish deacons, P T Beamish (q.v.) and F C Russell (q.v.) whom Broughton had refused to ordain to the priesthood.

Although determined to treat all his clergy as individuals and as responsible for their own views, Perry did seek to exclude from his diocese any who believed in the 'doctrine of Christ's presence, in any sense whatever, in the bread and wine upon the Lord's table after consecration', in auricular confession, or in private absolution. He also tried hard, but failed, to stamp out chanting and surpliced choirs since they threatened to turn the liturgy into a 'mere musical performance'. He fought a losing battle against the influence of the Ecclesiological Society since Melbourne now had a number of architects who understood its recommendations and incorporated them in their neo-Gothic design of church buildings.

The 1850 Sydney conference also explored the manner in which self-government might be granted to the new dioceses. Shortly after graduation, Perry had enrolled in a law course in London, and his legal training alerted him to the problems created by the inappropriate application of English ecclesiastical law to the new colony. Whereas his fellow bishops Short and Selwyn (of New Zealand) sought to establish a constitution for their dioceses on the basis of 'consensual compact', that is by voluntary agreement among the parochial representatives meeting as an assembly, Perry was convinced that an Act of the British parliament was necessary. In 1854 a bill granting self-government to the Church of England in Vic, introduced by the Attorney-General, W F Stawell, a leading Anglican layman, was passed by the Victorian Legislative Council. This received the royal assent in the following year, and in 1856 Perry presided over the first Church of England synod authorised by civil statute law in the colonies. The Anglican dioceses of Sydney and Tasmania were to follow a similar procedure, while the then remaining dioceses of Newcastle, Adelaide, and New Zealand followed the route of consensual compact without any reference to the legislature.

Perry's support for the decision of the Privy Council in the Gorham case and his enthusiasm for the Victorian Church Constitution Act branded him an 'erastian', that is one who believed in the ascendancy of the state over the church in ecclesiastical matters. It was a term of condemnation by the high churchmen who used it, carrying overtones of carelessness and disregard for the autonomy and integrity of the church. But it was quite a common position for Anglican evangelicals to adopt in the mid-nineteenth century, for to them the state connection seemed to be the best safeguard against the excesses of the Oxford movement. Perry was actually a voluntarist, disapproving in principle of state financial assistance for the church, but he was also a pragmatist. He therefore championed moves to involve the laity in the government of the church partly because he realised that, increasingly with the passage of time, they would have to finance the ministry of the church in the new and unendowed colonial environment. He believed that only a civil statute would permit the entry of laypeople into the government of his diocese. On the other hand, recognising his church was not a state establishment, he promoted the duty of regular giving or tithing, for this required no formal approval from the state.

Unlike Broughton who argued that the state should finance only the schools of the Church of England, as funding anything else was supporting error, Perry thought that the state should not support any religious groups. But the demand created by the gold rushes made him reluctantly acquiesce in state aid. To his dismay, Perry witnessed during the gold rushes the almost total cessation on all building in Melbourne, coupled with a dramatic surge in immigration, so that the possibility of providing places for people to gather for worship evaporated. 'In such a crisis as the present, it becomes a Christian to endeavour to strengthen and not to weaken the hands of our rulers'. He was therefore grateful for an increase in state aid in 1853, which, 'although I cannot approve of the principle upon which it was founded, conferred upon us very opportune assistance, for it practically secured to every Clergyman holding an independent cure, an income of not less than £450'.

In the Australian colonial debates over state control of education, Perry opposed both state aid to all religious denominations, seeing that as support for error, and also the total funding of education by the government, seeing that as eroding the responsibility of parents. Following the abolition of state aid in Vic in 1872, just two years before his departure, he was forced to acquiesce in the closure of many Anglican schools. By then Perry had already presided over the establishment of the Melbourne Diocesan Grammar School (1849) and Geelong Grammar School (1857), which he believed, because they were based on the principles of Thomas Arnold, were best calculated to produce the future leaders of society. In 1861 Perry sought in vain to reconstitute Geelong Grammar as a joint Anglican-Presbyterian foundation. Although Presbyterians were not dissenters, Perry was castigated by Charles Sladen, the lay founder of Christ Church, Geelong, and by J H Gregory, the Puseyite incumbent of All Saints, St Kilda, for his 'tenderness to dissenters'.

Perry was also a foundation councillor of the University of Melbourne. In 1851, the year in which both Victoria was separated from NSW and gold was discovered, he wrote, 'The creation of a people must always in a measure depend upon the means of education which are provided for them'. As principal founder of Trinity College, Melbourne (1872), he sought to recreate his Cambridge college, but of necessity the college had to take a different road in a more secular climate. He never managed to start a clergy training college in his diocese. He sent his men for training to Moore College in Sydney. For this he was constantly criticised, especially by William Wilson, an energetic bachelor, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Melbourne. The chief objections to Moore College were its low academic standards and 'narrow party spirit'.

In 1867 Perry became President of the reorganised Early Closing Association which had been formed in 1855 to agitate for the 6 pm closing of retail stores. Under Perry's guidance, it developed into a son of Workers' Educational Association, with a series of lectures on educational issues, especially the relation between evolution and theology. In September 1869 Perry spoke to a 'crowded to excess' audience on 'Science and the Bible'. Although many more liberal churchmen were prepared to jettison the value of the Bible as a scientific and historic text, whilst preserving its religious and moral supremacy, Perry was not prepared to make such a concession: 'true science' was the handmaiden not the challenger of revealed religion. He saw the need to move away occasionally from the literal interpretation of the biblical text and he acknowledged that the text was corrupted in places, but he firmly rejected the argument advanced in Darwin's The Origin of Species and Huxley's Protoplasm: The Physical Basis of Life which sought to undermine the scriptures. Perry's view was in line with that of many moderate evangelicals at the time. He argued that much of what was called 'science' was nothing more than unproven hypotheses, that wherever the truth of scientific claims was established after thorough investigation it never contradicted revelation, and that recent scientific speculation, such as evolution, after it has been subject to the same considered enquiry would not contradict the scriptures either.

By 1869 the growth of the Anglican church in Vic was spectacular, with 113 clergy, 162 churches and 75 parsonages. In 1873 a new diocese, Ballarat, was carved out of the Melbourne diocese.

Perry neither courted nor attained popularity. On his retirement the Church Times berated his 'obstinacy and Puritanism' and concluded, 'What a disaster it is when a Presbyterian or Dissenting minister who has missed his way and got into the church is made a Bishop'. On his return to Britain, Perry was appointed a canon of Llandaff Cathedral and maintained his lifelong support of CMS, now as a vice-president. In 1881 Ridley College, Cambridge, was opened, his finest achievement in retirement. Some criticised his requirement that college councillors should subscribe to a doctrinal statement, but Perry insisted that such a barrier was needed against rationalism and ritualism.

George Goodman, The Church in Victoria during the Episcopate of Bishop Perry (1892); James Grant, 'The Diocese of Melbourne (and Victoria)', in Brian Porter (ed), Colonial Tractarians: The Oxford Movement in Australia (Melbourne, 1989); James Grant, Perspective of a Century: A Volume for the Centenary of Trinity College, Melbourne, 1872-1972 (Melbourne, 1972); J S Gregory, Church and State (Melbourne, 1973); M Loane, Hewn from the Rock: Origins and Traditions of the Church in Sydney (Sydney, 1976); Perry Letter Book, Diocesan Archives, Melbourne; A de Q Robin, Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne: The Challenges of a Colonial Episcopate, 1847-76 (Nedlands, 1967); Jill Roe, 'Challenge and Response: Religious Life in Melbourne 1876-86', JRH, 5.2, December 1968, pp 149-66; F B Smith, ‘Religion and Freethought in Melbourne 1870 to 1890’, MA, University of Melbourne, 1960.

STUART PIGGIN