The Henson Journals

[171]

17th Sunday after Trinity, September 22nd, 1918.

1505th day [sic]

A dull morning, but not actually raining when I went to the cathedral at 8 o'clock for the Holy Communion. I celebrated, and Streeter "served". There were about 40 communicants. The morning I spent in my study preparing a discourse for the afternoon. After lunch Ella & Kitty accompanied me to Marden, where I preached in the parish church, consecrated an addition to the churchyard, and had tea with the Vicar (Rev. D. E. Rowlands). The church is of rather exceptional interest with a fine tower, a hexagonal(!) apse, the ancient well of St Ethelbert inside the walls, two fine hagioscopes, the old hooks in the sanctuary walls for suspending the Lenten veil, and the sanctus bell in situ. There are 6 finely–toned bells, which were rung with heartiness. Marden is a curiously difficult parish, with a scattered population, the church in the corner of an area 7 miles long. After our return to Hereford, I went for a short walk with Kitty beside the river, which is turgid & swollen.

[172] [symbol]

To the Rev. W. R. M. Orr LL.D.

Sept. 22nd 1918

My dear Sir,

I am grateful to you for calling my attention to the letter in "The Irish Churchman" of Sept. 19th 1918, in which a curiously perverse use is made of some words of mine in a recent sermon. If the writer had read the sermon himself, he cd hardly have misunderstood the passage so grossly. The preceding sentence runs thus:

"Reunion, so I am sometimes disposed to think, will come, less from the negociations of religious leaders, than from the triumph of the Christian spirit in the rank & file of the Churches".

I had in my mind a truth which stands out from the pages of the N.T., and has often been disclosed in Christian History, that there is not rarely a clearer spiritual vision and a juster sense of proportion among simple & uneducated believers than among the leaders of Churches. For these last may be blinded by narrower interests, professional and secular, & so miss the larger Verity.

The blunder of the Bolshevists was not in their ideal of fraternity, nor in their desire to bring into activity the latent consciousness of a common humanity, but in their ludicrous misjudgement of German intentions, & in their own criminal ambitions.

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Being such men as they were – destitute of justice, & full of the basest designs – they had no moral title to use the language of Fraternity, & their miserable collapse was assured from the first.

All that comes to us from the Front points in the same direction viz: that the soldiers, attracted very wonderfully to our Saviour, are revolted at the divisions of His professed followers, & their consciences make no response to the sectional appeals addressed to them. I think these simple men have a juster sense of proportion than those who, here at home, exalt into essentials such things as the form of ecclesiastical polity, and refuse fellowship on no better ground than difference of system.

Believe me, my dear Sir,

Yours v. faithfully,

H. H. Hereford

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