The Henson Journals

[136]

4th Sunday in Advent, December 24th, 1916.

874th day

A calm beautiful morning with enough snow on the ground to certify mid–winter. At breakfast we had an exasperating conversation, in which I maintained the tolerant thesis that the moral anachronism exhibited by Germany was capable of such an explanation from her history as allowed us to think charitably of her people. But Mrs Gow and Linetta will allow nothing in such an argument: Germans are just obscene vermin, and that closes discussion!

I attended Mattins, and afterwards celebrated the Holy Communion. Bishop and Mrs Quirk & Miss Christopher came in to lunch. I attended Evensong, when Gow preached from S. Paul's words: "Redeeming the time." He rejected the marginal rendering of R.V. ("buying up the opportunity"), and suggested that the sense of the original would be best conveyed by "redeeming the times." His blindness made the reading of his MS more difficult than it ought to have been. Meade–Falkner and his wife came in to tea: also the two boys – George Nimmins & Walter Jackson. To them I gave copies of Scott's Novels: "The Abbot" to the first, & "Old Mortality" to the last. The Royal Society of Literature having sent me some copies of my Lecture on Warburton, I sent off several by way of "Christmas Cards." After dinner I read to my family Ronald Knox's witty but ribald satire on "Reunion all round". It is really a venomous satire on the Church of England conceived in the interest of the Church of Rome. But it is extremely amusing, & in a society, cursed with the humourless obsessions of a thousand cranks, everything is pardoned to the man who can & will add something to the slendour stock of human amusement. As our Anglican "Fool" young Knox is well enough.

---