The Henson Journals

[377]

3rd Sunday in Advent, December 11th, 1904.

A white mist enwraps Westminster, and a black fog covers my own soul. It is strange how capricious and how despotic are one's moods. They are the whips of the Furies who deal out punishment to men's folly and fault: & then most do their strokes fall when the naked and quivering wretches can least sustain them.

Headlam had the audacity to preach exemptore. His delivery was much better than I expected, & he was less disconnected than might have been expected- but it was a rambling and unhelpful discourse, and confirms me in my old dislike of extemporaneous preaching. After service we took a constitutional on the Embankment, and discussed ecclesiastical politics. But we are wide apart: & when the fight does come, we shall be in opposite camps.

There was a large congregation at Evensong in the Abbey. I preached for exactly 35 minutes on the New Testament, being the 2nd of two sermons on "the Bible in the Church". After service Roxburgh, once of the Trinity College, Oxford, Mission in Stratford, came to see me with his brother. Reggie Adderly also called.

The night closed wet and dismal; so that the congregation at Evensong in S. Margaret's was small. I preached wearily on Pilate's question, ‘What is Truth?"

[378]

[symbol]

[symbol] To the Bishop of London.

Dec: 13th 1904.

My dear bishop,

I have to thank you for your volume of sermons, & to add the assurance, which I trust is not necessary, that I reciprocate to the full the personal affection you are good enough to bear me.

It is very unfortunate that the present situation has been created in the Church of England. & how we are to find a way out without great disasters I cannot yet see. Gore sent me his charge the other day. It might have been written by S. Carlo Borromeo, so hard and intellectually timourous [sic] is the spirit of it: &, quite in the style of the Holy Office, he tells us that he will "deliberately and remorselessly" exclude from the English Ministry all who cannot accept his personal view as to the formularies. This is not after the spirit of Christ, & it hurts my conscience.

/ He & Chamberlain seem making the same blunder in their respective spheres. Both preach "efficiency", & both seek it in the past. The one has unearthed the discarded system of protection: the other would galvanise into life the system of the Canons of 1603. They [379] [symbol] are men of such masterful temperament, & in their several ways so attractive to a modern democracy, that they will do a great deal of mischief before they too - like all similar body-snatchers from the cemeteries of the past - are laid aside with their toys! I prophesy that within five years those two men will be co-operating in a project of dis-establishment. /

Personally I have chosen my path. I am pursuing the quest which in earlier & better days Gore was supposed to have made his own. I believe the Religion of the Incarnation - better understood, correlated with much truth that now seems wholly incongruous, re-stated in many of its current definitions - is destined to recover the allegiance of our modern world and to save the race.

My wife and I both wish you all the happiness to the great, & permissible to the good!

Ever affectionately

H. Hensley Henson.

This epistle was marked ‘private'.

---

Issues and controversies: strained relationship with winnington-ingram