The Henson Journals

[706]

Thursday, March 30th, 1916.

605th day

A bright but clouded morning with higher temperature. I received the Holy Communion at 8 a.m. May celebrated. There were seven communicants beside the clergy. Ella went with Mrs Quirk to Bishop's [sic] Auckland. I wrote a number of letters, e.g. to the Archbishop of Upsala, to Cholmondeley, to Bob Bineham, to Carissima, to Fisher of Sheffield. Then I went into the city, and changed a cheque. Also I paid a small account to Alderman Pattison, and had some talk with him.

Macartney lunched with me, & proved himself an agreeable companion. He says that, when he was in Canada, he was told that Methodists were known among the colonials as 'black snakes', and mightily distrusted in business. This falls in with what Hovey Clark of Minniapolis told me as to giving no credit to Methodists: & also with what I learned in Montreal that the main obstacle to the projected union of the Presbyterians and Methodists in Canada lay in the rooted suspicion which the former entertained of the other as being deficient in commercial rectitude. That there has been from the first an anti–nomian current in Methodism appears to me certain. The doctrine of Free Grace operating on the morally squalid material which the Methodists, (to their credit,) dealt with, may account for much of this. Presbyterians are hard, narrow, & often low–toned, but they have a standard of honesty inherited from the past, & they do not often fall below it. I walked with Logic. While I talked with some of the cadet–officers in Houghhall Wood, where they were practising the art of surveying, the beast strayed away, & only rejoined me in the College, where he strove to make amends for his culpable indifference by vast exhibitions of delight and affection.

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