The Henson Journals

[519]

Tuesday, December 7th, 1915.

491st day

I wasted yet another day on the excellent Jewel. Frere's History does not represent him very fairly. It certainly is misleading to speak in his case of "the double standard of Scriptures & the doctrine of the primitive church", & to picture him as the champion of an Anglicanism which was sharply distinguished from Protestantism. In his day no such distinction was possible. He lived too near the great revolution for the supreme & deciding issue to be obscured. He never separates himself from the great Reformers of the continent. To them he sent his Apology, & they received it with warm expressions of approval. His appeal to antiquity was strictly polemical. He was undermining the Roman claim, not formulating his own case. The "Apology" is intensely & avowedly Protestant, and the fact that "it became the proper equipment of every parish church & of every minister's study" alone suffices to disallow Frere's theory of the English Church. I walked with "Logic", who failed to follow, & returned home by himself: attended Evensong in the cathedral: and wrote some letters. An announcement in the "Times" states that a son was born to Kitty Inge yesterday.

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