The Henson Journals

[663]

Friday, February 18th, 1916.

564th day

Two officers called on me to arrange for the church–going of their officer–training company. They decided to attend the military service if they could have seats reserved, & would number between 50 & 60. Both these officers had been at the Front, & had been wounded. They expected to go out again: meanwhile they are usefully employed in training the new officers. I wrote a little sermon for next Sunday.

Mark Pattison says that the latter half of George II's reign is 'perhaps the least–known portion of the history of the English Church'; and that 'the life of Warburton, which was passed wholly on the highways, and open to public inspection, is peculiarly calculated as a mirror of the clerical life of the XVIIIth century, or at least of the clerical section of it'.

Warburton "was well acquainted with the history of the Civil War, and told Hurd that 'there was scarcely a memoir or a pamphlet published between 1640 and 1660 which he had not read'." It would hardly occur to most men to suggest a likeness between Warburton and Gladstone, yet Pattison succeeds in doing so:

"In reviewing the Divine Legation, we cannot help being forcibly reminded of the Homeric Studies of Mr Gladstone. The differences between the two men are many and radical: the intellectual character of the two works is the same. A comprehensive general reading; an heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of the proof: a dialectical force of arm which would twist a bar of iron to its purposes: and all brought to bear to prove a perverse and preposterous proposition. The mischief done by such powerful efforts of human reason is not in the diffusion of erroneous opinion, but in setting brilliant examples of a false method."

---