The Henson Journals

[95]

Thursday, January 1st, 1920.

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I went to the cathedral at 8 a.m. and received the Holy Communion, sitting in the congregation with my wife, because I thought the new Dean would probably like to celebrate in his own cathedral on New Year's Day.

Thus I made a start in 1920, which must be a fateful year for Europe, England, and for the Bishop of Hereford. The financial situation public and private is cruelly embarrassing, and makes one's course vastly more difficult. To live literally on the extreme margin of one's resources is to be unable to adventure anything, to be condemned in fact to nothing beyond a cautious pedestrianism which becomes often enough a timid marking time! And yet the time calls for "leadership"! How can one lead when a visit to London disturbs, by the expenditure on railway & hotel, the carefully adjusted equilibrium of one's income? The Anglican clergy have lost their independence in becoming desperately poor, & now think & speak like the hunger–driven sectaries, whose servility they have looked down upon with natural contempt. Significantly enough, this servility, in their case also, goes along with extreme political opinions. They grovel to the rich, and they preach socialism at the same time. Their religious witness subserves their politics!

[96] [symbol]

The year 1919 will be notable in the annals of the Church of England as the year in which denominationalism finally vanquished the national ideal. The Enabling Act gives the coup de grace to the Establishment, though the fact will be obscured for some time to come by the retention of the legal position and ancient endowments. I have fought the denominational spirit hard, but it has been too strong. "The stars in their courses" have fought against the National Idea. It is the first time that the method of political agitation has been frankly adopted in the ecclesiastical sphere. Even so, I do not believe that the Enabling Act could have been carried if the public mind had not been obsessed by other & extremely urgent matters.

I attended a meeting of the Palladian Lodge, and the banquet which followed. We started at 3.30p.m., and did not end our business until nearly 10 p.m. The almost portentous gravity which marks the behaviour of these excellent Freemasons interests as well as amuses me. There is more in it than humbug for its own sake, though to say the truth, there is a vast deal more of the last than is either amusing or wholesome.

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