The Henson Journals

[314]

Low Sunday, March 30th, 1913.

The old view that savages have degenerated from a higher level of culture, on which their forefathers once stood, is destitute alike of evidence and of probability. On the contrary, the information which we possess as to the lower races, meagre and fragmentary as it unfortunately is, all seems to point to the conclusion that on the whole even the most savage tribes have reached their low level of culture from one still lower, & that the upward movement, though so slow as to be almost imperceptible, has yet been real and steady up to the point where savagery has come into contact with civilisation.

Frazer: "The Belief in Immortality". p. 88.

A dull heavy day which seemed to carry the depression of its own dullness into one's very soul. Dolphin took my place as celebrant at the early service, & Knowling preached and celebrated at 10.30 a.m. After lunch I shewed Violet the library with its treasures. At Evensong the Anthem was Wesley's – very beautifully sung. Violet declares that she prefers the singing of Durham to that of Westminster, & I am not sure that her preference is not justified.

[315]

At 6.30 I attended a second Evensong in the parish church of St Margaret, on the opposite bank of the Wear. There was a very large congregation crowded into a charming & commodious Norman Church. I preached on S. Paul's words: "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away, behold, all things have become new". The sermon was, perhaps, rather over the heads of the congregation, & I was not physically in good form. Moreover there was a prodigious amount of coughing. Lord Gray came into the Vestry, & made himself known to me: he had come over in Violet's car. He came to supper, & talked very interestingly about Canada. As an example of the narrowness of the English Church in the Dominion, he mentioned the case of the funeral service for King Edward: he had attempted to arrange a combined religious service of all the Protestant Churches: but Archbishop Hamilton, the Anglican Abp., who was to conduct it, refused point–blank, on the score that the non–Anglicans were schismatics. This is lamentable enough, but alas! thoroughly representative.

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