The Henson Journals
Tue 27 March 1917
Volume 21, Page 6
[6]
Tuesday, March 27th, 1917.
967th day
A bright morning, but bitterly cold. After writing some letters Ella and I wandered forth onto the parade. We walked the length of the pier. It has a glass screen protecting from the East wind – a generous & almost indispensable provision. We bought some stationary &c., and got back to the Hotel for lunch. After the meal I retired to my room, & rested. Before tea I wrote to Mary Radford, & Miss Anson. Beeching arrived about tea–time, having travelled from Norwich. We went for a walk on the sea–front until it grew too cold for such frail elderly gentlemen as we have now both become. The afternoon post brought a friendly letter from Ralph. Beeching tells me he uses the "revised Psalter" in Norwich Cathedral. This is nothing more than a scheme for a revised Psalter suggested by the Committee which the Abp. of C. appointed from the members of the Convocations: nevertheless Beeching holds himself free to treat it as sufficiently authoritative to replace the statutory Psalter in the Prayer–book. I told him that his position was in my view quite untenable, and cd not but prove in effect quite anarchical. He retorted rather feebly by pointing to the non–use of the copes in Durham Cathedral. But I replied that the disuse dated from 1759: that to restore a canonical practice abrogated by disuse required on canonical principles something more than individual authority: that canons were not of perpetual obligation as are statutes. These contentions he was unable to rebut, & had to plead that in the extraordinary circumstances of the C. of E., and with respect to indisputable & undisputed matters such as the mistranslations in the P.B. Psalter, wh. the revised version of the Abp's Ctee corrects, there was a sufficient justification for his confessedly illegal procedure. But all this appears to me no better than special pleading. At all hazards we must cling to the plane of law: once driven from that, we are on an inclined road, & must be driven downwards into anarchy.