Queen Victoria had been crowned on 28 June 1838. When she died in January 1901 there can have been very few people indeed who had even the vaguest memory of what her coronation had been like. There was an opportunity for scholarship to influence the shape which the ceremonies for the new monarch would take and there was both a liturgical interest and a liturgical expertise which had not existed in the 1820s and 1830s.

With one minor exception, it was not much more than a series of coincidences which linked Jowett and Colenso. The one exception was when Colenso was in England after being excommunicated by Robert Gray, bishop of Capetown, as metropolitan. Samuel Wilberforce refused to allow Colenso to function in the diocese of Oxford but Jowett invited him to preach in Balliol chapel, which was not under the bishop's jurisdiction. Apart from this there seems to be no evidence of direct personal contact between the two men.

In 1818 Dr John Philip was sent out to supervise the London Missionary Society stations at the Cape of Good Hope. His first letter to the Society’s headquarters is dated from Liverpool on 5 December of that year and contains the statement, ‘We have been at sea for seventeen days and are still in the Mersey River.’ Philip went on to ask for various items, including - significantly perhaps - a barometer! And there was time for the barometer to reach him before he left the Mersey: it was a further five days before the winds changed.

Africa has never been an absolutely dark continent to those who live elsewhere. From the days of the Phoenician traders of Carthage to the Afro-Arab mercantile empires of the fifteenth century Africa was always a source of what more literate peoples wanted. Long before modern Europeans began to explore the continent others had been there and taken their literary skills with them. In 1857 Richard Burton - the real Richard Burton - went on a journey to find the ‘reputed great Lake Tanganyika’ for the Royal Geographical Society. One hundred and thirty-four days’ journey into the interior he was the guest of an Arab dealer in slaves and ivory, of whom he said, ‘ He had read much, and, like an oriental, for improvement, not only for amusement: he had a wonderful memory, fine perceptions and passing power of language’. Arabic and Islamic culture penetrated into, and made a lasting impression on, many parts of Africa. Reading and writing sometimes accompanied this penetration and there are fascinating traces of attempts to reduce African languages to writing in Arabic script. Nevertheless, writing a history even of modern Africa requires a very different technique from that which is needed to write a history of Europe in the same period because it is far less concerned with documents.

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

Anyone who studies the techniques and strategy of early nineteenth-century missionaries and (even more) of early nineteenth-century missionary societies can hardly avoid gaining the impression that they suffered from a romantic casualness. It is as if zealous Christians of the period were so convinced that the Lord would guide and provide for the missionary that he really did not need much mundane preparation. Nineteenth-century missionaries often simply disappeared into bush, desert or jungle, stopped when they came to a site where there was food, water and heathen, and preached in whatever language happened to be available.

Nowadays when ‘Executive Officers’ and ‘Councils for Evangelical Strategy’ plan a ‘Younger Church’ one of the things they worry about most is the training of an indigenous clergy. In the nineteenth century men were not so self-conscious about missions. You took the Gospel to the heathen. You relied upon clergy coming from ‘home.’ Even where there was a small population of white colonists, they did not often expect to have to produce their own clergymen. Of the fifty or sixty Anglican clergymen who served in South Africa between the second British occupation of the Cape and the appointment of the first bishop (1806-1848), only one was born in the colony—and he was a white man.

It is probably no one's fault that general histories of the Church in the nineteenth century are so misleading about bishop Colenso. Unless one gets down to the primary source material, which is almost all in South Africa, there is no way of escaping from the distortions of controversy. Almost all the books about Colenso are unreliable. His own biography was written by an ardent admirer who hoped to succeed him as bishop of Natal. The lives of his principal opponents, Robert Gray and James Green, are just as unsatisfactory. Gray's life was written by his son. Green's was written by Dr. Wirgman, a frank and open controversialist. Histories of the Province of South Africa are either missionary propaganda, or else become so immersed in the constitutional and legal issues connected with Colenso, that the character of the man himself is lost. In consequence, the bishop of Natal appears in history as a kind of religious schizophrenic—on the one hand a great missionary who loved the Zulu people with an infinite tenderness and, on the other, a wilful and spiteful heretic for whom no action was too base and mean. Or, worse still, he is represented as a brilliant but misunderstood fore-runner of modern biblical scholars who was also by accident a South African missionary.

The Provincial Synod of the Church of the Province of South Africa met for the first time in 1870. A long controversy, of which the Colenso law-suits were the core, had made it plain that the Anglican Church was not, and could not be, an established Church in South Africa. The chief task of the synod was to provide some alternative machinery of government and a constitution which could legally serve as a contractual basis for the exercise of the Church's discipline. There were before the synod two documents of primary importance—the draft constitution which the South African bishops had been preparing since 1861, and the report of the first Lambeth Conference.