The Henson Journals

[462]

Monday, August 7th, 1916.

735th day

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The morning paper announced the death of Violet's brother, Sir Arthur Markham. He has made himself very prominent recently as a violent critic of the Government, and his indecent attack on Lord Kitchener, but a few days before the tragedy of the "Hampshire" will not soon be forgotten or forgiven.

After Mattins I had an interview with Hughes, & told him that I could not sanction his absence from the college, while the other minor canons were away.

I spent most part of the morning in reading the little volume "Our Place in Christendom", which has just appeared with the inevitable Preface by the Bishop of London. It is a curiously suggestive book, suggestive, I mean, of the state of mind which now exists among the Anglican High Churchmen. The evident obsession of all the writers is the Roman propagandism, which, one may fairly conjecture, is active and successful. There is barely an allusion, even indirect, to contemporary Protestantism. That seems to be wholly outside the concern of such Anglicanism as the writers represent. There is marked incoherence, almost reaching the point of mutual contradiction. Mason represents the prae–historic Tractarian point of view. Figgis is far gone in the newer school of evolutionary Catholicks. Whitney would root the Roman claims in Feudalism: Figgis would rather trace them to the imperialistic theories based on Roman Law. Scott–Holland is verbose, inconsequent, & enormously positive. Gore makes an immense parade of evangelical directness & simplicity as a prelude to the crudest sectarianism. A. W. Robinson brings all to an end in a little outburst of what the C.Q.R. [Church Quarterly Review] calls "cheerful journalism". The book is thus extremely vulnerable: but it is not without merits. Figgis & Whitney know what they write about, & say many true things in an effective way. To the half–educated this volume may well appear cogent, & even convincing.

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