The Henson Journals

[11]

Saturday, June 7th, 1919.

[symbol]

My dear Sir,

A mutual friend, Lord Charnwood, suggests to me that I might without risk of giving offence confide to you my desire that, if the Enabling Bill can be defeated (as in my judgement most desirable in the interest both of Church and Nation) there should be secured some improvement in the methods by which ecclesiastical legislation is now carried through, so that the Reforms which are evidently required to render the working system of the Established Church efficient, should not be hung up indefinitely. It seems to me that English Churchmen may fairly seek the cooperation of religious nonconformists for this purpose. No section of the Christian Church can gain by the inefficiency of any other. The main volume of such support as the Enabling Bill can enlist arises from the keen sense of intrinsic wrongness of tying the C. of E. to conditions which make for inefficiency which are well known, & which are certainly removable. It cannot be right to confront the Church with the dilemma, either remain Established at the price of inefficiency, or be disestablished. For most English Churchmen are, rightly or wrongly, convinced that Disestablishment would inflict losses, material & spiritual, out of all proportion to any advantage which it might bring. I should be grateful for an expression of your opinion on these matters.

H. H. Hereford

Sir W Ryland Adkins M.P.

[12] [symbol]

Dear Mr Lloyd Thomas,

I ought long ago to have thanked you for your letter & the papers enclosed with it, but I have been more than commonly obsessed with 'business' of one sort or another, & everything that is not actually insistent has had to wait. I have read all that you have sent with much interest, but not wholly with agreement. Perhaps it is the consequence of any historical habit that I am always rather suspicious of artificial religious combinations. The great efflorescence of symbolism & sacramentalism which is distinctive of Catholic Christianity grows from the stock of the Catholic dogma: can it survive as a living religious factor if it be cut adrift from its dogmatic root?

Can the dogmatic root be retained by a modernly educated Christian?

If the root be absent, can the value of the secondary products of historic Catholicism be really religious?

I suspect that those members of the Free Catholic movement who find religious value in the worship will tend to find their way to the historic Catholic Church, which for Westerns must (in spite of the Anglo–Catholic experiment) be Roman.

Time alone can prove or disprove this suspicion: and for that testing we must wait.

[13] [symbol]

Similarly, on the political side of the movement. If I understand it rightly, it effects a very close and direct relation between Christianity and Socialism. The language seems to imply the possibility of establishing an order of society conformable in all things to the Gospel; but, since the Gospel (i.e. the historic revelation made in Jesus Christ) contains "no pattern on the mount" for our initiation in essays at social reconstruction, we are left in considerable dubiety as to what "an order of society conformable in all things to the Gospel" would be. Personally, I think Socialism conflicts with true and indestructible elements of human nature, which Christianity, the Religion of Humanity must needs validate and hallow. Accordingly, I think, that as the social side of the movement develops, there will be a sifting out of the more specifically Christian members, who will spiritually be out of harmony with a system which bears hardly on, if it does not roughly disallow, the expression of individuality.

In a word, the movement seems to be too ambitious in scale, and too incoherent in principle to provide a permanent basis for Christian thought and fellowship. Its strength lies in the acknowledgement of discontents and aspirations, which the churches either ignore or frown upon.

[14] [symbol]

But a case of ^XXX [illegible]^however numerously filled and on motives however legitimate, is not the same thing as a church: though it may serve a useful temporary purpose. The evolution of historic Christianity would seem to have proceeded from Catholic to National, and from national to sectarian churches: the analytical process seems to have "touched bottom", and the great synthesis to be stirring. May it not be the case that the evolution will proceed by a recovery in larger forms of the lost historic unities? The sectarian churches will become national, and the national Catholic, but not with the old pinched limits and exclusive spirit. In the picture of the "New Jerusalem" the Church is shown as a City of God into which the nations bring their glory

And so I move by rapid stages to my personal duty with respect to situation which actually confronts us in England. Here in this framework of a National Church. The Church of England at this moment does not fill it adequately; but it preserves a tradition and provides a machinery. The memory of a united English Christianity may become a prophecy of a greater unity, which will not provoke Nonconformist [15] [symbol] revolts, because the truths for which Nonconformists revolted have become part of its own faith. Therefore I would maintain the Establishment, and administer it in a large welcoming spirit.

To pass the Enabling Bill will be to make the Church of England avowedly one denomination among many. It will stereotype the sectarian phase of English Christianity just when it is beginning to be spiritually venturesome. There is no future for the Anglo–Catholics. They may break up the National Church, but they cannot establish anything to take its place. Their destiny, like that of their true predecessors, the Non–Jurors, is to be submerged in the Church of Rome.

The restoration of a united English Christianity is, I think, within the range of practical politics; there for the present we must be content to call a halt. The larger and more distant vision of an united Christendom is as yet only a dream. Rome and the East are impossible; the first is parted from us by the whole alienating tradition, which is summed up in the Papal Claim; the last is parted from us by the centuries which intervene between Medievalism and the XXth century.

[16]

A complete unification of Christianity is at present almost unthinkable; we must apply the Apostle's counsel, 'Set not your mind on high things but condescend to things that are lowly'.

Pray forgive this long and rambling letter, which will at least serve to show that I am interested in your movement, and probably also that I fail wholly to understand it.

Believe me,

Sincerely yours,

H. H. Hereford.

The heat of the day made exertion unpleasing. I did nothing but write letters, have a few interviews, call on the old Dean, and water the garden with Olive, Jones the gardener having gone to Bristol to see a sick brother.

Archdeacon & Mrs Spooner arrived for the week–end. Marion writes indefinitely postponing Mother's visit on the ground that she has again had an attack of feebleness, which makes travelling risky. One daren't argue against that kind of reasoning.

Wynne–Willson did the letters, & copied my epistle to Lloyd Thomas into this Journal. He is a good fellow, & very obliging.

---