The Henson Journals

[119]

4th Sunday in Lent, March 30th, 1919.

"Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio, et interrogabam animam meam, quare tristis esset et quare conturbaret me valde, et nihil noverat respondere mihi. Et si dicebam: "spera in Deum", juste non obtemperabat, quia verior erat at melior homs, quern carissimum amiserat, quam phantasma in quod sperare jubebatur". S. Aug. Conf. IV (1.160)

So Augustine describes the state of his mind when sorrowing for the death of a much loved friend, whom he had drawn into heresy, but who had been baptized when sick & unconscious, & had died piously.

I left the Palace at 9.20 a.m. and motored to Brampton Brian [sic] where I confirmed 28 candidates. I lunched with Mr Hastings, the Vicar, and, his sister. There lunched also the local squire Mr Harley, who is lineally descended from the Puritan fanatic, Sir Robert Harley, who destroyed Edward VI's tomb in Henry VIIth’s Chapel, and claims to be entitled to the Earldom of Oxford, dormant since the death of the Harley who dominated Q. Anne. After lunch I motored through lovely scenery to Clun where I confirmed 40 candidates. I returned to Hereford via. Ludlow & Leominster, having to borrow petrol from a pot house in order to get home. Major Thelwell and his wife (née Angel Colenso) were our guests at the Palace for the week end.

[120] [symbol]

The difficulty of becoming acquainted with the clergy of the diocese is no small part of the practical problem which the bishop has to solve. Yesterday at Brampton Bryan, besides the Vicar Rev: H. T. Hastings, there were present the Vicar of Bucknell, Rev. J. S. Woodhouse, & the Vicar of Leintwardine, Rev. W. A. King King [sic].

Major F. Thelwell was bred at the Jesuit seminary of Feldkirk, and the Roman Catholic school at Ushaw, near Durham. He says that the teaching in the classics which he received at the first was far superior to that at the last: that the moral state of the schools was equal: but that the system of oversight & espionage which obtained in the Jesuit school had the effect of moral enfeeblement on the boys, which showed itself in later life. They only cared about being found out, the rightness or wrongness of their actions counted for little. He had noticed the same fact in the case of the Germans, who were trained in a system very similar in spirit and method to that of the Jesuits. He thought it explained the contrast between their normal docility and the deeps of licentiousness & brutality into which they fell, when the hand of authority was lifted from them. He spoke with some bitterness of the effect which the system of Feldkirk had had on himself.

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