The Henson Journals

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October 23rd, 1919.

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I went to the club, wrote letters, & lunched. Firth joined me at lunch. He looks rather worne & aged. I said that I had expected to see him enter the lists in defence of S. R. Gardiner, whose historical method & integrity have been so rudely assailed in the "Times". He said that there cd be no reasonable question as to that historian's absolute integrity, but his method was fairly open to criticism. Then I went to Paddington, & caught the train to Hereford. There dined with me Wynne Willson and Crawly, formerly Rector of Bishopthorpe, and now a kind of organizing secretary for the C.E.M.S. I had some conversation with him after dinner, but not wholly to my content. There is no getting away from the fact that these societies undercut diocesan authority, and place a potent instrument for fashioning opinion in the hands of the governing clique at the centre. The Bishop is treated with a mighty parade of dutiful deference, but he has no real control of the movement which takes its orders from an external authority, & pursues ends of its own.

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