He was ordained to the diaconate in 1848 and the priesthoodin 1850, holding curacies at North Walsham, Norfolk, and then West Ham, where he met his future wife Mary Winmill.

[1][2] During his West Ham curacy, the evangelical Cridge resisted the ascendant high church liturgy of the Oxford Movement, believing it hewed too close to Roman Catholicism.

Some members of the West Ham church believed Cridge was promoting Calvinist doctrine and complained to the dean.

The dean, himself an Anglo-Catholic, sought to solve the problem by recommending Cridge for a post as chaplain at Fort Victoria, the Hudson's Bay Company outpost on Vancouver Island.

Cridge had already been corresponding with a fellow Cambridge alumnus who had held the post and became excited by the missionary opportunities the frontier station posed.

Cridge's arrival coincided with the transition from HBC rule of Vancouver Island to the establishment of local authority.

In 1856, Douglas was forced to convene the first elected Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island, presided over by his son-in-law John Sebastian Helmcken.

[3] The assembly named Cridge the first superintendent of education for Vancouver Island, a position he held without pay for nearly a decade.

[6] Unlike previous HBC chaplains, the Cridges were enthusiastic about life on the Pacific frontier and earned the respect of many throughout the colony.

A bequest from John George Taylor enabled the construction of a larger brick Richardsonian Romanesque building at Hillside Avenue and Cook Street and the lifting of the age 10 cap on orphanage residents.

[6][10] Hills immediately set up another congregation in Victoria and ordered a prefabricated iron frame structure for it, a decision that irked many of the local Anglicans who worried the town could not yet support two churches.

Hills assigned the newly appointed archdeacon of Vancouver, William Sheldon Reece, to preach at the evensong dedication service.

"My dearly beloved friends, it is with the greatest shame and humiliation that as a matter of conscience I feel it is my duty to say a few words to you before we part," he said.

During the seventeen years that I have officiated as your pastor in this spot, this is the first time ritualism has been preached here; and I pray, Almighty God, it may be the last.

to whom not even the Bishop can dictate"—a position that Anglican archivist Frank Peake called "completely untenable" in an episcopal polity.

According to Ferguson, Cridge believed he was being rebuked for his evangelical convictions, while Hills was focused on the issue of canonical disobedience.

The REC was formed in 1873 by George David Cummins and other low church Episcopalians amid a similar conflict over churchmanship in the United States.

Cridge was assigned a missionary jurisdiction that encompassed British Columbia and all U.S. states west of the Rockies while remaining rector of Church of Our Lord.

[7] In the 1990s, the Church of Our Lord instituted the Cridge Memorial Theological College to train clergy for the Diocese of Western Canada.