The Henson Journals

[261]

Monday,July 5th, 1915.

336th day

[symbol]

Cummings, having passed the doctor's certificate, took his departure, leaving on my hands his wife & three little children!

A party of 22 dissenting ministers from Sunderland came to see the Cathedral, & then had tea in the Deanery. They indulged in some frothy rhetorick before going their way! It is an odd position which these men hold, for many of them have a difficult task to make a living. They are quite evidently de trop, & have no endowment or tradition (as we have) to conceal the fact. Their one operative principle of combination is opposition to the Church, and this they can hardly avow, & would probably deny. Yet there they are, with a 'mixed multitude', forming in the aggregate a very large proportion of the organized Christianity of the country, behind them. I would like to give most of them some kind of supplementary & non–humiliating ordination, & use them in the National church. Their ideas are not more chaotic or more absurd than are those of most of the curates, & their humble standard of education is not conspicuously inferior! They are more exasperating than culpable, for their fondness for a windy kind of flatterous rhetoric makes their speeches loathsome, & suggests a larger measure of humbug than the facts really require. Partly this is the result of their habit of life. Emotional rhetoric is their notion of eloquence: & eloquence is their test of ministerial efficiency: so the talking proclivities of their class (a loquacious one) are stimulated to an amazing extent. Pecksniffs are numerous in these circumstances, & even in the case of those whose intrinsic honesty makes Pecksniffery impossible, there is an aspect and manner of pompous unreality which make the average man 'see red'!

---