The Henson Journals

[150]

Saturday, August 18th, 1917.

1111th day

The rain heavily [sic] during the night but the weather cleared about 9 a.m. and the day was fine. My normal programme was followed. I attended Mattins and Evensong, walked with Logic, worked at the memoir. I received a letter from the Bishop of Winchester in response to my request for some information about Anson's connexion with the Oxford House. It is more coldly expressed than I should have expected. But of course there could never have been any real confidence between the two men, & I suspect that during the Educational controversies of 1902–5, when Anson was in office, they were far apart. I read through a vigorous attack on Sven Hedin the Swedish traveller, agitator & Germanophile. Even in an English translation the savage power of the satire is apparent. The author is a Swede – K. G. Ossiannilsson – who is evidently both a Social–democrat and an ardent advocate of the war against Germany. I was reminded by the ferocious personalities in which he indulges, of the controversies in which Milton was engaged. The book may stand together with "Hurrah & Hallelujah" by the Danish Professor Bang, and the famous cartoons of the Dutch artist Raemakers, as an indication of the genuine sentiments of the European neutrals. These, and men like them, are the true exponents of the Christian conscience, which at bottom is necessarily one with the human conscience itself, not the Pontiff of Rome who claims to speak as the Vicar of Christ. The accumulation of sonorous sentences and the parade of very sacred phrases rather emphasise than conceal the squalid & cynical worldliness of the Pontifical motives. All the world sees through the Vatican, and yet none can dare to ignore the polite convention which assumes that Benedict XV is an unworldly saint, far removed from the sordid actualities of the bad world, through which he passes like a child through a crowd of brawling drunkards, or a stainless angel through the streets of Sodom! It is the lust of gratuitous imposture that most oppresses and perplexes me about my contemporaries.

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