The Henson Journals

[172]

Saturday, December 9th, 1916.

859th day

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Asquith's speech to his party was dignified and patriotic, yet marked with deep feeling and a sense of having been 'wounded in the house of his friends'. Lloyd George has 'jockied' his old chief, to whom he owes much. Indeed the least defensible act in Asquith's political career – for such I judge to be his condonation of the Marconi scandals – was performed in Lloyd George's interest. The 'Spectator' has some caustic reflexions on the sudden desertion of the older statesman, & the eager acclamation of the younger.

"The rattle of politicians, journalists, soldiers, sailors & the quidnuncs of the London clubs hastily doing a quick about turn reminds one of nothing so much as the great passage in Saint Simon's Memoirs describing the death of Louis XIV. The moment the breath was out of the body of the King the courtiers tore down the long echoing corridors at Versailles to the Dauphine's apartments, for all the world like a mob of stampeding horses. Le roi est morte: vive le roi! So with the Prime Minister. There was a regular stampede from the extinct Prime Minister to the new 'Chief'. We quite understand the desire to support whoever is carrying on the King's Government. We ask, indeed, for that support with all the force at our command. The spectacle of these very quick conversions is, however, anything but pleasant".

The news from the Battle Fronts continues to be depressing. Greece is being starved into anarchy, and Roumania's destruction proceeds apace. A German raider is reported to be at large in the Atlantic: & the fiendish weather paralyzes the Allies in France. Add that the wetness and gloom of the day strike inwards on one's spirit, and make one feel undone and hopeless. In the sunlight much is tolerable which in a damp fog crushes one.

[170] [symbol]

I attended Mattins and Evensong: wrote some of the Lecture: sawed up wood: and read Mathieson's book. The description of Chalmers, and the role he played in the Church of Scotland are curiously suggestive of Gore, and his role in the Church of England. Then as now the opportunity came with the religious reaction caused by a long war: and then the dénoument of Chalmer's vehement & ubiquitous labours was the Disruption of 1843. Will the final consequence of Gore's activity be the Disruption of the English Church? I think the possibility of that disaster is obvious, and the probability hard to dispute. Chalmers began as a "Moderate" but "the conversion to Evangelicalism of a nature so keenly susceptible to the spirit of the age could only be a matter of time," and he soon became an ardent Evangelical. Gore began as a "liberal" (if the little flicker of liberalism in "Lux Mundi" can justify that description); he has become the leader of Anglican obscurantism. Both the Scotchman and the Englishman are keenly interested in social affairs. Chalmer's experience in Glasgow may be set against Gore's in Birmingham. The account of Chalmers's oratory suggests Gore's. "Always engrossed with the object immediately in view, he had now wrought himself up, to the conviction" – is a phrase which might be often applied to the latter. "The religious reaction [i.e. after the Napoleonic War] had culminated in its natural result – the overthrow of Moderatism and the establishment of an Evangelical ascendency in the Church." I suspect that as much will be said of the Sacerdotalist ascendency in the English Church after the present War. It is all horribly depressing to think over. Fawkes arrived. The Dawson Walkers dined.

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