The Henson Journals

[164]

Friday, September 12th, 1919.

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My dear Sir,

I hope you will allow me to thank you cordially for the excellent letter, which I have just read in the 'Times'. It is a just & powerful statement of what I must needs think to be the truth: & it ought to do much good. Bishop Gore is to some extent the victim of his own ardour. He imagines a situation which no doubt on his view ought to exist, but which in point of fact does not exist. The sense of inner disagreement does not emerge ^for ordinary English Churchmen^ when they are listening to Non–episcopalian preachers & reading their works, but it does emerge when they come into contact with Roman Catholics. The real position is that the inner agreement is so real & so insistent that it must find congruous expression.

I note, though with a satisfaction not untinged with anxiety, the large concession which you and other Non–conformist leaders are prepared to make on the point of episcopacy. It is a real & notable contribution to unity, but I wd like it guarded a little more carefully with an explicit assertion of the proper indifference of specific forms of polity in the Church of Christ. Our spiritual fellowship cannot be made to turn on polity, and our religious cooperation ought not to be conditioned by it. Why should a large variety of political types be inconsistent [165] with ecclesiastical unity? Is the Federation a lower type of association than the Empire? History may yet validate it.

With sincere regards, I am

Sincerely & gratefully,

H. H. Hereford.

This letter I addressed to Carnegie Simpson, after reading a very excellent answer to Gore in the "Times".

After lunch I took Sir John & Lady Struthers, Elizabeth, and Clarence in the motor to see Kilpeck, Abbey Dore, and Madley. In Abbeydore we found Caröe with his son Alban, sketching in the ambulatory. He is very insistent that the Church shows evident signs of French workmanship. The glass in the East Window he says is Laudian. Madley is being ill–used by the insertion of a heating apparatus, which fills the crypt, and thrusts a hideous pipe against the external wall of the chancel. We got back to the Palace in time for tea. The road to Kilpeck & thence to Abbey Dore was badly cut up by the drawing of timber.

Dr Maples with his wife & daughter came to dinner. He talked freely of his experiences of local government in the London suburbs, drawing a very disconcerting picture of squalid dishonesty, and extravagance. It would seem that we have little to learn from America in these distinctive qualities of modern "democracy".

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