The Henson Journals

[27]

Thursday, May 16th, 1918.

1382nd day

I wrote to Carissima, & packed my bags before breakfast. After breakfasting at the Athenaeum, I walked to Westminster, and called on Gamble. Then I walked into the city in order to lunch at the Mansion House. I called at the Deanery of St Paul's, & had speech with Kitty. Ralph walked with me to the Mansion House whereto he also was invited. I was placed beside Professor McLaughlin, one of the two Americans, in whose honour the lunch was arranged. I proposed a vote of thanks to the Lord Mayor, who is rather a superb specimen of municipal functionary. After lunch I went to Paddington, & returned to Hereford by the 4.45 p.m. train, arriving a little before 10 p.m. I beguiled the journey by reading through Ronald Knox's account of his conversion or perversion to Rome. He calls his apologia "A Spiritual Aeneid”, and heads every chapter with a suitable tag from Virgil. Its principal interest is not the explanation of a clever whimsical boy's religious escapades, which cannot have any great importance either for the Church which he decides to desert, or for the Church which he elects to join, but the light it casts on the actual situation within the Church of England, and the revelation it makes of the moral perverseness of what is now called "Anglo–Romanism". The atmosphere of demoralizing flippancy, in which Ronald Knox and the set to which he attached himself habitually lived, is a novel and most disquieting feature. For behind the band of unbalanced though brilliant boys were many older men who guided and used them.

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