The Henson Journals

[54]

Friday, February 20th, 1920.

The seat of Truth is aloft, of Virtue in the midst; both places of honour: but neither truth nor virtue draws to an utter extremity.

Sir Edwin Sandys

It was snowing hard at daybreak. I wrote to Mr Bickerstaff, bidding him come here to see me at 4 p.m. on Thursday next.

The Rev. S. J. Richards came to see me in obedience to my summons. He brought with him his churchwarden, a farmer named Hassall. He admitted that he had closed his churches on November 2nd, and one of them on Nov. 9th. He explained the circumstances, and promised that the fault should not be repeated. The population of Walterstone & another parish in the diocese of Llandaff, which he holds by dispensation, does not reach 200 souls, and of these 3/4 are Dissenters. Mr Richards is unmarried, & lives in lodgings in Pandy. I asked how he occupied his time. He said that he had hobbies of his own – liturgiology & music – & these helped him to endure the solitude. He was a round thick–lipped man of a familiar Welsh type, not unlike in aspect the Bishop of St. David's.

I attended Lilley's lecture in the Lady Chapel. It was excellent. He started by quoting from an Oratorian, who wrote in the early part of the XIXth century, named Tabaraud: This excellent man appears to have reviewed the prospects of Christian Union in 1808, and arrived at a very depressing conclusion. Lilley's thesis that the real barriers are the conflicting "group temperaments", which have developed since the Reformation contains much, though not the whole, truth.

[55]

Bossuet [sic] negotiations with Leibnitz for the reconciliation of the Lutherans and Roman Catholics "broke down on this point of variation".

"Individual Catholic doctrines, such as purgatory or the Mass, Leibnitz thought that his countrymen might accept: but he refused to guarantee that they would believe to–morrow what they believed today. "We prefer", he said, "to belong to a Church eternally variable, & for ever moving forwards". [v. Cambridge. M.H. V. 87 ]

Jurieu, the Calvanist opponent of Bossuet, anticipated Newman's theory of development, and he was largely in agreement with the famous Jesuit, Petavius. The modern Roman Catholick has accepted the argument of the 17th century Calvanist. Salmon points out that the whole value of the theory of Development depends for the Roman Catholic on the dogma of Papal Infallibility, by which true development can be surely and authoritatively declared:

"There are Eastern developments and Western ones, Protestant and Romish, even infidel developments: which is the right one? The Romanist answers, The Church of Rome is infallible: she alone has been commissioned to develop doctrine the right way; all other developments are wrong. Let the Romanist prove that, & he may use the doctrine of Development, if he then cares to do so: but it is quite plain that without the doctrine of Roman infallibility, the doctrine of Development is perfectly useless to a Romish advocate". [ v. "Infallibility of the Church" p.42.].

This seems to me sound as well as acute. The proving of Infallibility is, in the nature of the case, impossible.

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