The Henson Journals

[22]

21st Sunday after Trinity, October 28th, 1917.

1182nd day

Very cold. I went to the Cathedral at 8 a.m., and there celebrated the Holy Communion. Edgar Dobbie was there, & four choir–boys. My post was more interesting than usual, for I had letters from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Manchester, the Secretary of the Lord Chancellor (about Emmett), Harry Dibben, Arthur & Carissima.

I preached at Mattins from S. Matthew ix.2, introducing into my sermon the pathetic legend of Christ's healing of the fallen mule. After service I walked with Bayley. The autumnal foliage is almost transatlantic in its brilliance. After Evensong I finished reading through A. G. Little's Ford lectures, "Studies in English Franciscan History", published by the Manchester University Press. It is full of information, & extraordinarily interesting. The following might surprise some of our zealots:–

St Bernadino of Siena held attendance at sermons even more valuable than attendance at Mass. If of these two things you can only do one – either hear the mass or hear the sermon – you shd let the mass go rather than the sermon". (v.p.133)

He has a remarkable extract from Roger Bacon's Opus Maius in which the Franciscan savant of the XIIIth century declaims against the brutality of the German House (i.e. Teutonic knights) who "ruin all hopes of converting the pagans owing to the wars wh they are always stirring up, & because of their lust for domination". (v.p.210–212) The tradition of hypocritical brutality has been well maintained, & is now threatening to destroy even civilization itself.

[23]

To the Bishop of Manchester

October 29th 1917

My dear Bishop,

I am greatly obliged to you for letting me see the enclosed. It confirms me in my suspicion, now growing fast into a definite belief, that the majority of the Episcopate is really acting in a conspiracy to force forward the Selborne programme, & that all the parade of consulting the Church, & examining the scheme of the Report, is mere tactics, or, as the Americans would say "shop–window dressing".

I like your suggested Amendment, & hope you will go forward with it. It hardly covers the same ground as the amendment wh I drafted, which indeed might be properly supplemental to it. I incline to think that it might be worth while to send in both. What do you think?

The practical difficulty is to get anybody, who is prominent in the Church, to take any public action against the Abps & Bps. The new cult of episcopacy (v. Whitney's "The Episcopate & the Reformn" for a striking illustration) permits endless disobedience to individual bishops, but cuts the sinews of any really self–respecting independence. Everywhere men agree in private to regret, and fail in public to resist.

I agree that a letter on the National Church rather than on the Establishment is what would be most useful. Would Arthur Benson be the sort of man to draft it?

I am very anxious that we shd not scare away the [24] Liberals who are all for reforms but averse from Disestablishment, & genuinely alarmed at the prospect of "autonomy" on clericalist lines.

Always sincerely yours,

H. Hensley Henson

I wrote also to Rashdall, sending him a copy of the amendment I had drafted (v.p. 19) The composing and writing of these letters wasted most of the morning. I attended Mattins & Evensong.

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