The Henson Journals

Sun 28 December 1913

Volume 19, Page 96

[96]

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Sunday after Christmas, December 28th, 1913.

A bright day but very cold. I failed to get up for the early service, and communicated at the midday celebration. Bishop Tucker preached a rather ranting sermon. The grand vice of Evangelical preaching is the total absence of any didactic (i.e. intellectual) quality. A congregation accustomed to such sermons would be completely untaught, & while probably exalted beyond measure, would be mentally undeveloped. Hence, perhaps, the extreme facility with which Evangelically trained persons are carried away to other forms of teaching. They have no coherent convictions, only a set of feelings, which cannot exist outside of the emotional atmosphere of Evangelicalism.

The morning post brought me a kind note from Curzon, with a copy of his "Rede" Lecture: also a very pleasant letter from Kenneth Muir Mackenzie & several other letters of goodwill.