The Henson Journals

[53]

Wednesday, December 1st, 1920.

The papers announce that Willie Temple has been appointed Bishop of Manchester, and that he is only 39. I expected this appointment, & therefore am not surprised. Yet it is a surprising thing that so young a man should be sent to so great a position. And there is real force in the objection that such early appointments tend to excessively long tenure of office, and disturb the normal flow of preferment. It must be considered a magnanimous action on the part of the Prime Minister to nominate to the episcopate a member of the Labour Party. I am not displeased that Willie Temple should at last have to face the problems of office. His career as an agitator for Reform has been astonishingly successful: & it is unquestionably advantageous that the men who count shd be on the Bench. In Manchester he will have to work with the Lancashire Churchman, who is certainly not inclined to "Labour": yet the spread of socialistic feeling in ecclesiastical circles during the last few years has been so extraordinary that I doubt whether he will find himself inconvenienced by his patronage of Socialism. It is not unfair to attribute his rapid advance to the circumstance that he was his father's son. He is one more example of the fact that power still belongs to those who are "born in the purple". As a member of the aristocracy on his mother's side, & heir apparent to the primacy on his father's, the new Bishop of Manchester starts his episcopate with favourable auguries.

[54]

The ecclesiastical colour of the northern Province has been very sharply and suddenly changed. Moule, Knox, Diggle, and Drury were the most conspicuous Evangelical Bishops. They are replaced by men who, however they may be described, are in no sense Evangelicals. Henson, Temple, Williams, & Strong are curiously unlike the men they succeed. The three last are perhaps to be described as "liberal High Churchmen", that is, they are all sound on the episcopate, but slightly modernist in doctrine!

Fawkes writes to me:

"English Roman Catholics are greatly scandalized both by the Irish bishops & by the silence of Rome. If one regards the Catholic Church, or perhaps any other, as a Divine Teacher, the situation is no doubt perplexing. But, if one thinks of it as primarily a politico–ecclesiastical institution, one is less surprised &, in fact, it does not seem to be in the Churches that the best mind & conscience of the time are now to be found. It is curious how much less severely political assassination was judged by ancient & medieval opinion than by modern. More weight was attached to O.T. and classical precedent – Ehud, Judith, Brutus etc: also in early societies it was a more effectual remedy than it is now: & there were fewer other means of escape. One may be thankful for the singular horror in which murder is held in this country."

All this is interesting & suggestive.

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