The Henson Journals

[137]

Saturday, April 12th, 1919.

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I spent the morning on the memoir, which hangs fire woefully. In the afternoon I walked with Ernest, and did my letters. Streeter called, and I talked with him in the garden for an hour. He is deep in psycho–therapeutics, and has started experimentalizing on his own account. He says that he has been successful in cases of shell–shock. I have a vague fear that much mental & moral confusion is bound up in the Faith–healing movement. But, for good or ill, it appears to have "come to stay". It is a lamentable thing to be wholly outcast from the characteristic tides of one's own time: but that is a situation into which I feel myself drifting.

Elizabeth Smith arrived during the afternoon, and the Campbell Dodgsons in the evening. They tell me that Mrs Romanes has become a Roman Catholick.This is the fitting dénouement of her career as a militant neo–Tractarian. But Gore must needs feel distressed at the defection of another disciple. Streeter thinks that he intends to devote his leisure to a polemic against Anglican Modernism, but I doubt whether his heart lies in that controversy. His interest, perhaps, lies in the Roman controversy, in which he first made his name as a controversialist. In later years men turn most willingly to the concerns of their youth, and tend to grow weary of the conflicts which filled their manhood.

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