The Henson Journals

[19]

12th Sunday after Trinity, August 25th, 1901.

This hotel is not satisfactory. It is noisy & sunless: & it seems difficult to secure attention to one's bell.

Stockholm was the home of Emmanuel Swedenborg a prophet who still counts his followers by many thousands in many lands. There is something pathetic in the tenacity with which men cling to his fantastic dreams. Not the weakest, most ignorant, & stupidest by any means, though these also are in his following: but men of character, brains, & position, who ought to be, one would think, superior to mere folly & mental imposture. The really intolerable thing about religion is that it should be professional & mundane: & this is the case of the Christian Church. Gross scandals are less oppressive to the conscience than this dry, cold respectability, which abjures enthusiasm & pleads utility. The unseen world, with its mystic forces & unbounded horizons, cannot be interpreted & revealed by dull decorous seers, drawing fixed stipends, reading fixed liturgies, & descanting good sense in formal homilies. Yet, how can we be more? I wrote letters to Podge & Kirshbaum, & then went to the English Church. The service was desecrated & the pulpit abused by a mountebank with the aspect of a low music hall singer, who mouthed out the prayers, psalms, & lessons in a manner that would have been ludicrous if it had not been also profane. The sermon was a prodigy of brazen vulgarity. How I sat through it astonished me to reflect upon. The wretch roared the hymns with an energy & effect, which confirmed the suggestion of his face & manner. He must have been a public singer. Twice during the service he retired into the vestry, irresistibly suggesting the suspicion that he was seeking refreshment in the professional manner. He wore a Dublin hood, & his name is Shepherd, if the notice–board speaks truly. This is the climax of our experience of the English Church on the Continent. At Amsterdam there was a tiresome display of ignorant, fanatical, irrelevance: at Copenhagen the feeble product of broken–down incompetence: at Stockholm, the blatant effusion of arrogant, inbred vulgarity. Can we marvel at the low reputation of Anglicanism abroad, when we are represented by such rubbish as these men illustrate?

After lunching we picked up letters from the Post: & effected a migration from the Hotel Belfrage to the Hotel Rydberg, a palatial establishment. After tea we again went to the Skanseu, which was crowded. The people were extraordinarily well–behaved, very different to an English crowd of holiday–makers. There was no drunkenness, no horse–play, no shouting: but quiet rational enjoyment. We discovered the bears, & were astonished at the size of the brown, & the humourous agility of the white bear. The latter beast got hold of a malacca cane, & made play with it in the water, to the huge delight of the onlookers. We also admired two immense elks. Then we had supper & returned to the hotel: & I came away to my room; & to bed after writing letters. So ends my 3rd idle Sunday. I have written letters to Podge, Kirshbaum, Rutherford, Maxse, and the Dean.

---