The Henson Journals

[61]

Wednesday, June 19th, 1918.

1416th day

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I wrote to the Abp. before breakfast in these terms:–

My Dear Lord Abp.

In view of your Grace's letter I will with your permission withdraw my notice of motion, & think about some other procedure. But unless a very urgent misfortune is to come on us, we must find some way of escape from the situation into wh. we are being carried, & wh. will commit us as a Church, not only to a war à outrance with the State on the question of Marriage, but also (and this, perhaps, is not the lesser mischief) to a further subordination of the higher intelligence & conscience of the Church itself to that narrow & narrowing faction wh. calls itself profanely "Catholick". The Ctee which I contemplated was advisory to the Bishops to assist them to formulate a policy. Your Grace is quite right in thinking that I regretted, & have made no secret that I regretted, the appointment of Lord Selborne's Ctee on Church & State. The revision of the Establisht. Seemed to me, & still seems to me, a subject wh. cd only fitly & constitutionally be referred to a Royal Commission. The circumstance that the so–called Representative Ch. Council requested your Grace to act did not seem to me to affect the unconstitutional character of the proceeding. And I think we are only beginning to gather the ill harvest of that mistake. But this is my singular & continuing misfortune thus to be at cross–purposes with your Grace, for whom I have so deep a regard & admiration. However, you are as magnanimous as you are wise & therefore I am at best free from the necessity of concealing the dissidence of I must needs feel.

Always, my dear Lord Abp.

Dutifully & affectly

H. H. Hereford

[62]

I worked at the Birmingham Sermon, & attended a meeting of the Trustees of the Blue Coat School. After lunch I took the Archdeacon with me in the car, & motored to Aymestrey, where the rural dean & his clergy met me in order to settle about military service. After tea at the vicarage, we called on Mrs Dunne at Gatley Park, and then went on to Wigmore in order to visit the parish church, a large building of great interest & antiquity, but much too large for the parish. The parson, Bamford, an ex–elementary school master is a dull lifeless fellow who seems to regard the contumacy of his flock as a ground for my sympathy, rather than for my censure. He is the only resident minister of religion in the place, yet out of his 350 parishioners, hardly more than 20 come to communion at Easter, and most of the people follow the ministration of itinerant sectaries. This failure of the Church of England precisely where she enjoys a practical monopoly is as perplexing as it is discreditable. And always the cause appears to lie not in the defects of the system but in the utter inadequacy of the personnel. All the "Life & Liberty" in the world could not make Christianity real to the people so long as its actual presentation in word and life is entrusted to such men as now occupy the parishes. They are not scandalous, but they are depressed, secular–minded, out of sympathy with the people, listless & hopeless. And a large proportion are aged and even senile. I suspect that all pastoral work has ceased in many parishes for many years.

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