The Henson Journals

[595]

2nd Sunday after Epiphany, January 16th, 1916.

531st day

The weather continues to be unseasonably and unwholesomely warm. I wrote to Carissima before breakfast. Hughes preached to the troops in my place. Before Mattins I installed Mr Collings, one of the newly appointed honorary canons. After Evensong various people came in to tea, &, after their departure, I wrote letters to Hugh Lyon in Hospital, and to Tom Yeoman at the Front.

'A mind which can be edified by the tricks of a 'medium' is saved, not by intrinsic ability, but by the accidents of time and place, from sharing the grossest superstitions of Zulus or Esquimaux.'

Leslie Stephen 'An Agnostic's Apology' p. 357.

'No creed can be said to have a genuine vitality which is not one of the forces to be taken into account in the actual, everyday conduct of life, wh. cannot make itself heard, if not actually obeyed, in the blind struggles of passion wh. stir the vast bulk of the social organism.'

Ibid. p. 360.

How far would Christianity survive this test? How far would one's own individual profession of Christianity sustain its application? These are questions which it is painful to raise, and humiliating to answer. Perhaps, indeed, they cannot be answered: but the mere raising of them disturbs and saddens the considering mind.

That queerest of poseurs, Meade–Falkner, came in to supper, and stayed on talking paradoxes until nearly 11 p.m. He described himself in the Cathedral as 'a mere onlooker', & I incline to think that the description is not inadequate. Religiously, I should suppose that, if he has any definite convictions, he is a Roman Catholic. He has a positive horror of any attempt to make Christianity reasonable.

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