The Henson Journals

[33]

Tuesday, May 1st, 1917.

1002nd day

A most brilliant & perfect morning, an ideal May–day. I went to the Cathedral and celebrated (vice Archidiaconi [in place of the Archdeacon]) at 8 a.m. The morning post brought me a copy of the History of Magdalen Hospital with an inscription from the author, Compston. It is an excellent thing that there shd be so much eagerness to undertake the history of foundations, though an unkind observer might say that the Anglican clergy cannot handle any greater subjects than those which concern the antiquarian and the ritualist. Add some controversy of an exhausted kind, and a certain amount of exegesis almost entirely of the grammarian's type, and there is not much else to be found in the intellectual output of the "stupor mundi" [the stupid of the world], the Anglican clergy. I attended Mattins, & then settled to an attempt to make a start with writing the Memoir: but my progress was deplorably small. I attended Evensong: and later took the chair at a lecture on 'Heredity' which Clarence Stock gave in the Lecture hall. There was a good attendance of students of both sexes, considering the depleted condition of the University. The argument is rather terrifying. When the transmission of moral dispositions is displayed in charts on the black–board, a desolate sense of marionette–dom ['puppetry'] grows over the mind, & 'the plausible casuistry of the passions' seems to receive the respectable sanction of science. It is the waxing suspicion that our manly consciousness of self–direction is but the hallucination of our vanity that lies at the root of that decay of the 'sense of sin' which the theologians deplore. Who can hold himself responsible for the evil legacy of his grandmother? The whole Christian thesis is built on the supposition of individual responsibility, & though the Pauline notion of an [sic] hereditary taint may fit in well–enough with the modern view of heredity, yet Christianity assumes the victorious power of Divine grace to destroy the empire of inherited sin, and to make the believer morally free. And it is becoming a question of whether the experience of Christendom confirms this view, or whether the often–asserted moral superiority of Christian society be anything more than another valourous essay of human pride. The War has 'taken the conceit out of' Christian apologetics.

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