The Henson Journals

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Monday, October 20th, 1913.

Eleven years ago – Oct. 20th 1902 – Ella and I were married in Westminster Abbey. We are today what those years have made us. It is a well–nigh impossible thing to travel back, and recall, the vague hopes & expectations which filled my mind as I knelt beside my wife before the Altar, which had witnessed my vows & hers. We know now that our home is to be empty of the best things that make home. That black day in January casts a chill over my heart still. It is not yet clear to me how best to handle so great a catastrophe. We have been much together at home, & abroad: & I suppose there are no discoveries to be made by either of us into the other's character. This transition from Westminster to Durham has opened a new chapter, and the nature of that chapter's contents are yet hidden. Death has been busy among those who were together in the Abbey at our marriage. Duckworth is dead. Ella's parents are both dead. Charles Parker, from whose house we were married, is dead, Edith Bruce is dead: & Colonel Gore–Booth: also his brother Henry. Ella is almost destitute of relations now, as I always was. We are curiously alone in the world, with a widening circle of acquaintances, and only a collection of epitaphs for friends!

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Aleck Lawrence went off by the early train. He is a strange bundle of radical shibboleths & shallow altruisms. If only there were some sense of the gravity of things in these young fools!

I travelled to Edinburgh by the afternoon express, arriving about 6 p.m., and drove at once to 39 Palmerston Place, where Mitford Mitchell received me with his accustomed kindness. He had arranged a dinner party in my honour. There were Henderson, ex–Moderator of the U.F. Church, Patterson; Forrest; Mackintosh; Weir; Rankin; and one other. We 'reason'd high' of many things, & passed an agreeable evening.

How strange to me is this passion for ecclesiastical independence, which these Presbyterians profess, & quite evidently feel! Here is their tiny sect, set in a corner of Christendom, & conspicuously marked by local features which a sympathetic student of Scottish history must needs regard with indulgence & even respect, but which an intelligent & educated man cannot help seeing to be practical defects; & here are its members using the lofty language about it which was extravagant on the lips of the Medieval Pope, who was held by an united Christendom to be Vice–Deus! The men are quite serious; & cannot perceive the grotesque impression which they make on an observer's mind.

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