The Henson Journals

[538]

1st Sunday after Trinity, June 25th, 1916.

692nd day

"God calls many souls through the trial, the distress, perhaps the agony, of intellectual difficulty: and the circumstances & results of intellectual trial are often as mysterious as moral trials." (Dean Church)

"Dr Johnson's solemn irony expresses one of the deepest truths of our one–sided nature." He who is growing great in electrifying a battle wonders to see the World engaged in the prattle about peace and war", – he whose soul is in the stars or the depths feels small interest in such commonplaces as sin and repentance, pain and despair, death and God" (Ibid)

The sermon on "The Life of Intellectual Self–Sufficiency" was preached in 1876, and is included in the volume of Dean Church's sermons entitled "Pascal and other Sermons" [Macmillan & Co. 1895]

I installed the Rev. Thomas Urmson, Rector of Willington, as an Honorary Canon before Mattins. He read the lessons both at Mattins & at Evensong, and made his statutory declaration after the 2nd lesson at Evensong. There is a pathetic interest to such professions of loyalty to the Church of England now when no one appears any longer to concede any authority to its distinctive positions. It is difficult not to feel that the Church of England has ceased to believe sufficiently in itself to justify independent existence. Almost confessedly the soi–disant Catholicks treat it as a useful instrument for leading hood–winked Protestants of England back to the Roman fold: and as to the Evangelicals, so called, they have no intelligible principles at all: but live in a welter of phrases & shibboleths. Their link with Anglicanism is custom and preferment. Some might observe of the section of Anglicans called 'Liberal' that their link with the Establishment is only the preferment!!!

[536]

Meade Falkner called after tea, and had much talk. I shewed him my extracts from the S. Margaret's Register, and he was much interested. He and I are at one in thinking that the High Anglican or Anglo–Catholic position is untenable but while he holds to the Roman, I hold to the Protestant alternative. The materialism of the sacramental doctrine now current in "Catholick" circles is well evidenced by a letter in this week's issue of the 'Church Times'. The writer is complaining of the length of the services of Holy Communion or, as he will call it, the Mass. He can hardly spare the time to wait for the Prayer of Consecration, being a 'business man' & compelled to hasten. "These minutes (i.e. the time occupied by the Ten Commandments, by an unnecessary deliberation, and by actual pauses) are precious to us, for "Sirs, we would see Jesus", and would say our morning prayers in his Presence. There is the medieval conception ingenuously confessed: and the motive for reservation disclosed. The consecrated wafer is so frankly identified with the Saviour, that in its presence these people think themselves in His: & where it is absent, He is not accessible to them! There can be no doubt that the very crudity of the idea commends it to the multitude. The consecrated Wafer, hidden in its Tabernacle behind dimly lighted lamps, and seen, if seen at all, through a veil of incense and smoke, made the centre of ostentatiously abject adoration, becomes a very God to the worshipper, whose intelligence is completely submerged by a flood of exstatic emotions. He will not discuss: he cannot argue: he can but murmur litanies: & bend in worship. What real difference is there between this attitude of mind and that of the Ephesian mob which cried for two hours "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!"? If there be such a thing as idolatry, how can this treatment of the Consecrated Wafer be different from it?

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