The Henson Journals

[107]

Wednesday, July 31st, 1918.

1458th day

The lesson for the day is Romans I. I was more than ever impressed by the careful & deliberate statement of belief with which the great doctrinal epistle opens. To every Jew, but most of all to an ardent & learned Pharisee like S. Paul, the decisive point in the religious controversy raised by the new sect was the character of Jesus. Who was He? It is quite inconceivable that so cardinal a fact as His Birth of a Virgin could have been ignored, or suppressed, still less that language should have been used with respect to Him which properly disallowed it. None can question the natural sense of the words – "His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead". The elaborate argument of chapters 4 & 5 seems to compel reference to the "Virgin–Birth", if indeed that had formed part of the Apostle's belief about Jesus. There is no clear allusion to the "fact" throughout S. Paul's writings, so that we may conclude that he ran his whole career, & was the foremost figure in the controversies of the church, (which mostly turned on the character of Christ) without ever coming into the knowledge of it. But the ignorance [108] of the illustrious convert presupposes that of his teachers. In 1 Cor: XV he states with care & emphasis "that which he received" about Christ, &, though his purpose did not require that he should state more of his creed than that which concerned the Resurrection, yet the connexion between a super–natural Birth and a super–natural exit from the Grave is so close & so evident, that he could hardly have omitted it, if it had been included in his belief. In view of the close personal connexion between S. Paul and S. Luke, it is impossible not to allow that the ignorance of the Apostle tells on the question of the authorship of the Evangelist's "Birth–narrative". If S. Luke wrote that narrative, S. Paul could not have been ignorant of it: if S. Paul had known it, he could not have excluded it from his epistles, in which he has so much to say about the character of Jesus Christ. If the Lucan authorship of the "Birth–narrative" be conceded, then its integrity, and its interpretation, become questions of urgency. If a single phrase in Mary's reply to the Angel – "seeing I know not a man" – be omitted, is there anything which properly affirms a "Virgin–Birth"? Is it impossible, or even improbable, that this phrase is an interpolation made by the same hands, and with the same object, as those which substituted "Joseph" for "his father" in more than one place? It is an odd fact that S. Luke should collide with S. Paul both in his account of the Lord's Birth, and in his description of the Risen Christ. Is it more than one more illustration of the too–familiar phenomenon of a master's teaching being coarsened & so far misunderstood by a disciple?

[109]

Ella went off with Mrs Burgess on an excursion to Tintern Abbey. After the doctor had done with me, I went across to the Palace, and completed the short address for the cathedral next Sunday afternoon. I wrote letters to Philip le Mesurier, Frank Pember, Archdeacon Winnington–Ingram, and the Automobile Association. Also I sent into the Bank Weldon's cheque (£353:2:0) for fittings & furniture at the Durham Deanery. Clarence Stock came & sate with me in the garden, & read me some interesting letters from a friend of his, now a doctor in India. A letter from Ernest Pearce tells me that Gamble is to be the new Dean of Exeter; & T. A Lacey probably the new Canon of Worcester: the "Times" announces the appointment of Montagu James, the Provost of King's, to be Provost of Eton.

I received an anonymous letter rather violently worded which described me as a Unitarian, and included the Archbishop of Canterbury in the same denomination! The offence which most weighed with the writer was my going outside my own diocese to sow the tares of my heresies! If the Bishop of London visits 25 dioceses as the Prophet of the so–called "National Mission", his praises are in all men's mouths: if the Bishop of Hereford preaches an occasional sermon in London or Birmingham, he is denounced as a "gad–about", who neglects his flock! But in the eyes of the "orthodox" a heretick is as the "vermin" to which no "law" is given by the sportsman. I suspect that I am only at the beginning of my troubles from the rage of mine enemies.

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