The Henson Journals

[59]

Trinity Sunday, June 6th, 1909.

Twenty five years have slipped away since I was ordained a deacon in the parish church of Cuddesdon by Bishop Mackarness. Bishop, Archdeacons, Chaplains (save Holmes the domestic chaplain) are now all dead. I keep an anniversary, which grows more melancholy as its burden of associations waxes, in a strange place.

The Bishop & I went across to the humble wooden building which bears the unusual description "Gethsemane Cathedral". He celebrated the Holy Communion according to the American rite. I was agreeably surprised by an alternative "proper preface" for Trinity Sunday.

I preached at Mattins from the Gospel for the day. In the afternoon, the Bishop & I went to the "Commencement Service" of the North Dakota Agricultural College. I was asked to make the "Invocation", (a short extempore prayer) & to read the "responsive" psalm, which I did. A certain orator from Minneapolis, Dr Marion D. Shutter, delivered an interminable & platitudinous address, & then the Bishop gave the Benediction.

It is certainly both significant and encouraging that public intitutions should thus voluntarily invest their proceedings with a distinctly Christian character. Of course the Christianity is frankly undenominational.

[60]

I have promised to preach tonight at a church across the river in the State of Minnesota. The associations of the day determine my subject. I shall take the vision of Isaiah for a text.

There was a fair congregation, a mixed choir of boys, girls, men & women: a popular & heaty service. The parson – Young – had rather a squalid aspect, but he impressed me the better as I observed him the more carefully.

I observed several fine Roman Catholic Churches in Fargo, where the population does not exceed 15,000. The Protestants are split up into numerous sects. This contrast everywhere encounters the visitor to this country. A large intake of foreigners mostly Papist swells the membership of the R. Church. If the immigrants remained loyal to their ecclesiastical allegiance, the United States would become a Roman Catholic country within a measurable & by no means large space of time. Americans are very confident that the common schools are able to correct the normal tendencies of Papistry, & they speak with much assurance of a new type of Romanism being created on this continent: but they offer few reasons for the faith that is in them: & such as they do offer are not very weighty.

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