The Henson Journals

[124]

Thursday, August 15th, 1918.

1473rd day

Before getting up I read aloud to Ella Cowper's "Expostulation". It would be difficult to improve upon the following as a description of our "Ritualists": it is by the Poet himself applied generally, though suggested by the religious decay of ancient Israel: –

Then Ceremony leads her bigots forth,

Prepar'd to flight for shadows of no worth;

While truths, on which eternal things depends,

Find not, or hardly find, a single friend:

As soldiers watch the signal of command,

They learn to bow, to kneel, to sit, to stand;

Happy to fill religion's vacant place,

With hollow form, and gesture, and grimace.

It is in this poem that the famous denunciation of the Test Act occurs. It follows a remarkable description of the "nabob's" career: The poet addresses Britain thus unflatteringly: –

Hast thou, though suckled at fair Freedom's breast,

Exported slavery to the conquer'd east?

Pull'd down the tyrants India served with dread,

And raised thyself a greater, in their stead?

Gone thither arm'd and hungry, return'd full,

Fed from the richest veins of the Mogul,

A despot big with power obtained by wealth,

And that obtained by rapine and by stealth?

With Asiatic vices stored thy mind,

[125]

But left their virtues and thine own behind?

And, having truck'd thy soul, brought home the fee,

To tempt the poor to sell himself to thee?

[ All this might be applied not unfairly to our Rand millionaires, and rubber speculators, who have shone in Park Lane of late years. ]

Hast thou by statute shoved from its design

The Saviour's Feast, his own bless'd bread and wine,

And made the symbols of atoning grace

An office–key, a picklock to a place,

That infidels may prove their title good

By an oath dipp'd in sacramental blood?

A blot that will be still a blot, in spite

Of all that brave apologists may write:

And though a bishop toil to cleanse the stains,

He wipes and scours the silver cup in vain.

[The bishop presumably was the braggart, carnal, paradoxical Warburton who represented the Test Act as the essential feature of Establishment.]

In 1785 Cooper published "Tirocinium; or a Review of Schools", in which he drew a dark picture of the public schools of the time, & denounced them as morally contaminating and intellectually sterilizing. It is gloomily suggestive that precisely the same picture has recently been drawn by Aleck Waugh, a Sherborne boy, in "The Loom of Youth". Probably in 1917 as in 1785 there was exaggeration, but, as probably, the broad impression conveyed is not unjust.

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