The Henson Journals

[147]

Good Friday, April 18th, 1919.

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The exceeding fineness of the day lured me into the garden where I spent the afternoon. I had devoted the morning to the composition of a sermon for Easter Day in which I had little success. Preaching grows ever more difficult to me. Beyond attending Mattins & Ante–Communion service in the Lady Chapel, & Evensong in the Cathedral, I did not attend the services.

Jimmie Adderley who had been conducting the "Three Hours" Devotions in the cathedral came to see me, and talked with me in the garden. He is evidently in a very unsettled frame of mind. Modernism in its Roman form has "bitten" him, but he retains the sentiments & habitudes of the highly sacerdotalised Anglicanism by which his ministry has been determined. There is an inability to follow out consistently any course of reasoning which makes him rather "impossible" as an ally, but he interests me as probably symptomatic. My mind travelled back more than 33 years when we first came into personal contact at the Oxford House. We were a brace of ardent fools. He was Abbot, & I was Prior, & there was no absurdity of ascetical experiment which we were not ready to attempt. We are both disillusioned and discontented now, he in his Vicarage and I in my Palace. It were hard to say which has made the most complete failure of his life.

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