Studdert Kennedy

There had been but two rectors in seventy-five years [in Leeds], John Moultre and John Murray. Both were men of character, and the former something of a saint, after the quiet Anglican style, which means he was intensely venerated in his immediate locality and virtually unknown anywhere else. This was the man who died of smallpox, after a ministry of fifty years, while visiting a child parishioner in the epidemic of 1874. He was very greatly beloved, though he could be sharp when he wished, as when, an earnest evangelical lady saying she had sat under his ministry for many years and gained no good from it, he looked at her quietly for an appreciable time before saying, ‘I believe it, Madam.’ His successor, Murray, a stern Tractarian high-churchman, much feared in the town, with an untidy beard and a habit of drinking cold tea throughout the day, used in the latter days of his ministry to astonish visitors already impressed by his own antiquity by taking them along to see his mother, still briskly surviving.

From pg 57 of Woodbine Willie, a biography of G K Studdert Kennedy, by William Purcell, published 1962

Lenten

We’ll be coming up to Lent soon, that forty-day period still observed by the Catholics and Anglicans when a sense that we need to change the pace of life and reflect more on who we are, spiritually, and where we’re going. I was brought up as a Catholic, in the days when things were rather tougher, especially in Lent. While there was no definite rule about what you should give up during the time, you were made to feel that if it wasn’t something very particular you might as well be damned from that point on. Things have gone to the other extreme now, and I suspect many Catholics and Anglicans barely notice that Lent is passing.
I was reminded about this in regard to the following quote, which I picked out the Star Weekender – it was published on the 24th Feb, 1985, and was attributed to the Rev Dean Robert Mills, then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, in Dunedin. Lent must have been early that year.
"Have you been dieting since Wednesday, or walking to work instead of taking the car? Maybe you’ve stopped buying Golden Kiwi tickets. These little forms of self-denial are often practised by people over Lent."