The Henson Journals

[180]

Thursday, December 7th, 1916.

857th day

Bucharest has fallen. Lloyd George is to form the new Ministry. Athens is more insolent than ever: the German submarines more active. The Allied offensive on both main fronts is arrested by weather. It is difficult to see a ray of light anywhere in the whole outlook.

Rogerson called to see me about Payne. It is evident that the little man with his very unmilitary & slightly sanctimonious appearance has got on the nerves of recruiting officials. I did what I could for him.

Hobbes in the concluding pages of the Leviathan gives free expression to the contemptuous loathing with which he regarded the clergy. Though he speaks specifically of Papists, his language suggests a far wider reference. Here he introduces a famous phrase:

"If a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power." p. 386

In the appended 'Review & Conclusion' Hobbes has some admirable observations on the authority commonly ascribed to antiquity:

"Though I reverence those men of ancient time that have either written Truth perspicuously, or set us in a better way to find it out ourselves, yet to the antiquity itself I think nothing due. For if we will reverence the Age, the present is the oldest. If the antiquity of the writer, I am not sure that generally they to whom such humour is given, were more ancient when they wrote, than I am that am writing, but if it be well considered, the praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition & mutual envy of the living."

[178]

Payne came to see me as I had suggested. He is not very easy to handle. It is hard for a man of his type to realize how absolutely unimportant the individual must needs be in the eyes of the military authorities, when they are obsessed by the necessity of providing "cannon–fodder".

Sir Thomas Browne in his address "To the Reader" prefixed to his curious treatise 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or Enquiries into very many received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths', has some striking declarations:

"We are very sensible how hardly teaching years do learn, what roots old age contracteth unto errors, and how such are but acorns in our younger brows grow oaks in our elder heads, and become inflexible under the powerfullest arm of reason."

He excuses his use of English rather than Latin, & observes that there seems to be some probability that the two languages will become blended:

"Indeed if elegancy still proceedeth, and English pens maintain that stream we have of late observed to flow from many, we shall within few years be fain to learn Latin to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either".

He explains the necessarily discursive character of such a work as he has projected:

"We hope it will not be unconsidered, that we find no open tract, or constant manuduction in this Labrynth, but are oft–times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of Truth."

The whole address is most curious and characteristical of the rare whimsical genius of the author. With this work is bound up the even more famous treatise "Religio Medici", the 7th edition 1672. This in turn is followed by "Annotations upon R.M." and "Observations upon R.M.", occasionally written by Sir Kenelm Digby Knight, 5th Ed 1672.

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