The Henson Journals

[216]

Tuesday, March 15th, 1921.

Andrew Marvell, as the typical Puritan citizen, might serve as the subject of my sermon at Hull. I should note his membership of the Established Church, his dislike of sectaries, his rather contemptuous attitude towards clerical politicians, his keen sense of civic obligations, his commercial integrity & efficiency, his deep personal religion, his scorn of luxury & wantonness. He certainly held a high view of the clerical office which he describes as "of all others the most eligible and worthy, consisting in the sweetness of a contemplative life, the inestimable care of men's souls, a freedom from the common occasions of vice, & from the mechanical drudgery of raking together a fortune." (The Rehearsal Transposed" p. 378). He held the secular pomp of the clergy in abhorrence, and regarded the Laudian emphasis on ceremonial as a mere "throw–back" to Judaism. He resented the clergyman in politics, partly because the clergyman's sphere was elsewhere, and partly because the political incompetence of clergymen was in his opinion so evident. He held a large theory of the King's ecclesiastical supremacy as demonstrably necessary in order to restrain the quarrels & interferences of the clergy. The long–standing belief in the greed and ambition of the Hierarchy, which had survived the downfall of the medieval system, was one of the fixed constituents of his thinking on ecclesiastical subjects. He was convinced that the magistrate was the Divinely–appointed instrument for carrying out ecclesiastical Reformation: and he had no love for "popular" action in rebus ecclesiasticis [church business]

[217]

"Who is there that ever reads the Scriptures, unless he put on ecclesiastical spectacles (and those too have a fly ingraven upon them), but sees plainly what tenderness is due unto the scruples of Christians; that our Saviour hath taken conscience into His immediate protection, and how conformable the Apostles were to His rule therein, both as to doctrine and practice? What Englishman, reflecting seriously, but must think it hard that a man may be a Christian in Turky upon better conditions? That the French, Dutch, and the Walloons, even at Canterbury, may serve God here more freely than our own natives? That it shall be a privilege among us to be an alien, while an home–born subject must pay the double–duty (nay forfeit his whole estate) for the Protestant Religion? What Christian man can conceive how a man should lose his right to the sacraments for dissenting from the ceremonies?

(i."The Rehearsal Transprosed" p. 521.)

Mr Harrison, the Vicar of Brandon, came to ask me to permit a Welsh parson, who had been discovered in adultery some while since, & was now said to be penitent, to come to his parish as curate. I refused. Clayton & I motored again to Sunderland, where I confirmed 28 persons in S. Stephen's Church. These were all the candidates from two parishes with a combined population of 11,000 souls! We returned to the Castle after the service, arriving at 10 p.m. precisely.

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