The Henson Journals

[369]

Thursday, September 2nd, 1915.

395th day

Letters from Gilbert and Reggie, both expecting to be sent to the Front immediately & exulting in the prospect. Thirteen months ago they were decent Christian lads, feeling malicious to nobody: now they are obsessed with a desire to slay Germans! And the strange thing is that they are both greater, mentally & morally, than they were! Was ever Moralist confronted by such paradoxes?

Here is Bishop Creighton on the effect of the Reformation in England:–

"The Reformation intensified England's tendency to isolation. It deepened, if it did not create, the less attractive features of the English character – a narrowness of sympathy, an inability to recognize problems which lie outside the sphere of immediate practice, & a disregard of logical principles of national action". ['The Church & the Nation' p. 171.]

Mr Holmes, a nephew of Dean Lake, lunched here with his 'ward', an Indian, who is to study agriculture at Newcastle. He says that he stayed often in the Deanery, but he had little to disclose beyond telling us that Mrs Lake kept ferrets in the Crypt, which is now the Chapel. I attended Evensong after officiating at the first part of the Funeral Service for Mrs Armes, the widow of the former organists. Then I walked with Logic: finally we dined with Knowling & his niece, to meet Mrs Cheadle & her son Oscar from Westminster.

What the assertion of 'private judgement' meant in the sphere of individual life, that the 'Royal Supremacy' answered to in the sphere of national life. 'Nationality' is also a form of individuality: & it may not be refused its rights. Both may be exaggerated, & take morbid forms. 'Nationalism', like 'individualism', is a corruption of a good thing, implying a loss of wider conceptions of duty. In a rational ordering of the world a just liberty of self–expression must be given both to the individual and to the nation. But the Moral Law, the Law of Righteousness, is above both.

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