The Henson Journals

[176]

Thursday, October 14th, 1920.

I resumed work on the sermon, for such it really is, on the text "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday and today, yea, and for ever": but I did not make much progress. I have reached the stage of shrinking from religious phraseology to which I find myself unable to give a precise meaning: and this circumstance adds enormously to the difficulties of sermon–composition. Thus with regard to that text, I am not clear what exactly the author had in his mind when he wrote it, and I am even less clear as to what I have in my mind when I repeat it. Yet it does serve to indicate what I would desire to be able to affirm, namely, that in this moving masque of mimes and chams there is Something that is permanent, and Somebody who is trustworthy. That affirmation must indeed be the assumption of faith in a Divine Revelation through the Incarnation of God in a person. The very fact that it is so hard to make, and so difficult to explain, gives a measure of the religious embarrassment in which a modern believer is inmersed. In what sense is the Christian Revelation of truth an unalterable thing, "the faith once for all delivered to the saints"? In what sense is the historic Jesus a wholly trustworthy person on whom here and now men and women may depend and whose guidance they may securely advance through life? How shall an adequate personal experience be recognized, appraised, and formulated in terms of a convincing confession? To answer these questions successfully would disclose an Apologia worth having.

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