The Henson Journals

[254]

20th Sunday after Trinity, November 5th, 1916.

825th day

Keep me, O Lord, in the fellowship of Thy Saints, & lead me in the way of their pilgrimage. Let Thy Hand be upon me as well in the quiet times of leisure, as in the dangerous days of conflict. Cleanse my mind's eye that it may see truly, and open my mind's ear that it may hear clearly. Remember not against me my old sins, but purge my conscience from dead works to serve the living God. May Thy Holy Spirit lead me forth in the ways of righteousness for Thy Name's sake. Show Thou me that way that I should walk in for I lift up my soul unto Thee. Amen

I celebrated at 8 a.m. There were nearly 50 communicants. The post brings a letter from Colin Kennedy. He has been again "over the top", but 'the frightful weather proved too much for me. I am now in hospital, the exposure to rain & cold giving me severe influenza'. I wrote a 'Collins' to Mr Pember, and also to Ella. I preached at Mattins with much vocal discomfort. The wind is in the east, & that makes me all but voiceless. Then I lunched with Knowling. Gee & his wife were also there. Knowling lent me an excellent pamphlet by the late Bishop Dowden of Edinburgh – "Helps from History to the true sense of the Minatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. A letter addressed to a Layman of the Diocese", Edinburgh. Robert Grant & Son 107 Princes Street 1897. He holds that the formula dates probably from the first half of the 5th century & that the occasion of its composition was probably the bitter persecution of the Catholics by the Arian Vandals. This circumstance also explains its tense, stern spirit.

[252] [symbol]

Willie Temple would seem to have travelled far and fast on the 'slippery slope' of episcopalianism. In the current issue of his organ, 'The Challenge' (Nov: 3rd 1916) there is a leading article headed "Our Lack of Guidance", which is about the most grovelling production I have yet seen. He tells us that the whole Bench of Bishops represents for us, the divinely appointed channel through which the Holy Spirit speaks – the local representation of the consensus episcoporum to which the English Church has appealed since the Reformation as against the claim of the Bishop of Rome to supremacy. He would ascribe to the Bishops a general infallibility, & an universal range of authority. Not only in such matters as the abolition of pew–rents and 'the restoration of the Eucharist to its rightful place as the central act of Christian worship', but also in the temperance question, the question of a "living wage", the problem of housing, the right use of capital, or the problems of Church Reform, does he clamour for episcopal direction. 'The churchman who desires to know the teaching of the church is obliged, in default of any clear instructions from the leaders of his own church, to find in the Roman communion the definite guidance that his own Fathers– in–God ought to furnish'. He goes on to say that unanimity is not required, a majority of the Bench would suffice. "The Bishops are either the organ of the Holy Spirit or they are nothing". The whole tone of the article is abject in the extreme. I had not realized how far the mischief of servility had gone. It reminds me of the kind of writing in which "Ideal" Ward indulged, only there is no trace of his real mental power.

[250] [symbol]

Meade–Faulkner invited himself to dinner. We talked, and turned over books for two hours, & then walked round the College admiring the Cathedral under the brilliant moonlight. He is the more enigmatic the more I see of him. His knowledge is vast and multifarious. He reads Greek in bed daily at Elswick. Scholarship and Shells go oddly together but he is an embodied paradox. I expounded to him my scheme for filling the Neville screen with statues, and he expressed warm approval. He was heartily contemptuous of the Greek Church which he held to be barbarously superstitious. He assured me that he himself had been present at an exorcising of black–beetles in a house by a Russian priest. His own partialities are frankly Roman.

What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep & feed? a beast, no more

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god–like reason

To fust in us unused . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at stake.

(Hamlet)

I wrote a short letter to the 'Guardian' supporting Ralph's indictment of Gore's "Manual of Membership". I wrote a letter to Carissima. This is a poor record for the Lord's Day, & yet I feel as fatigued as if I had worked hard.

---