The Henson Journals

[174]

Wednesday, September 12th, 1917.

1136th day

A bright day but with a fretful wind and lower temperature. I worked at the Liverpool Sermon, being only interrupted by an applicant for permission to photograph in the Cathedral, who rewarded my complaisance with a gift of two photographs of Rheims. He said that he had heard me preach in Westminster Abbey ten years ago! I showed him the kitchen. "Father" Thornton & Hughes lunched with me, and afterwards I shewed the Mirfield monk the Deanery, & then took him for a walk. He struck me as an ingenuous youth, really trying to be liberal–minded, but much handicapped by his principles. He told me that Bishop Gore had lost the confidence of the younger men of his own school: & that Bishop Talbot also was ecclesiastically passé. Headlam he thought too exasperating to command much acceptance. The afternoon post brought me "with the author's complts" the little book "'I appeal unto Caesar' the case of the conscientious objector, by Mrs Henry Hobhouse". After dinner I read it through. She writes temperately and very persuasively. It think it is impossible to deny that she makes out her case. There are some 800 men in prison who have proved to demonstration the genuineness of their conscientious objection to military service, & who are gaining no benefit whatever from the provisions of the 'Military Service Acts', which were expressly designed to meet their case. It is most painful reflect [sic] that most of these men are firmly persuaded that the course they take is required by their loyalty to Christ, and that some of them have in the past proved themselves to be exceptionally good specimens of Christianity.

[175]

To Mrs Henry Hobhouse

Sept. 12th 1917

Dear Madam,

I have to thank you for sending me your little book "I appeal unto Caesar", which I have read with much appreciation of the spirit in which it is written, and, I think, with substantial agreement. No man certainly more completely approves this War, & holds its firm prosecution until Germany has been decisively defeated to be more plainly required than I do, but I have a horror of entering on a conflict with the human conscience, & a firm conviction of the impolicy & essential injustice of coercing conscientious men. At the same time, the practical question is certainly difficult: there is much disposition in some quarters to shirk national duty, and a vast deal of grotesque individualism which uses the plea of conscience as the masque of disloyalty & cowardice. Still, it is undeniable that there are many genuine conscientious objectors now in prison, & suffering very severe hardships, who yet appear to be precisely the persons for whom the Law designs relief, & who are wrongly deprived of their legal rights. I wish they could be released with delay.

Believe me,

Yours v. faithfully,

H. Hensley Henson

The controversy in the "Times" between Sir Lewis Dibdin and Lord Parmoor does not throw much light on the question. It is very repugnant to the general feeling of the nation to release men who, in this pinch of public necessity, refuse to do anything for the country. This repugnance is most fiercely felt & expressed by the officers & men who have the handling of the conscientious objectors. The tribunals are certainly affected in varying degree by the same feeling, & the result is that these unhappy men do not always or generally get the relief which the Law does undoubtedly intend them to have.

---