The Henson Journals

[304]

Saturday, April 23rd, 1921.

I walked to the Club through a heavy downpour of rain. There the Bishop of St David's held me in talk for a whole hour by the clock. Then I prepared notes for the sermon to the King tomorrow, taking them from the MS. of the sermon which I preached last in All Saints, Sunderland. After lunching at the Club, I essayed to walk to Elvaston Road, but was turned back by a deluge of rain. I read Ralph's article on "The future of the White Race" in the Quarterly. It is brilliant, pessimistic, and distressingly convincing! It is difficult to advocate the League of Nations with that in mind! But I wish he could bring into his visions of the future some suggestion that Christianity may have a role to play in the future. Why must he assume that the salt has disappeared from the world? His own religion is so completely detached from ecclesiastical systems that it does not occur to him that most people cannot contemplate religion apart from them. I fear, therefore, that much of his brilliant writing is silently rendered into anti–Christian versions by "the man in the street". Later I started again on my journey to Elvaston Place, and was nearing it, when my way was arrested by Lord Chelmsford, who insisted on carrying me off to his house for a talk. He bears evident tokens of the sun of India in his face, but looks amazingly fit.

[305]

The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear:

Robes and furr'd gowns hid all. Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

None doth offend, none, I say, none.

The "Times" prints a column of the Lecture on Shakespeare which is being delivered today at Weimar by Prof: Max Forster the Professor of English Language and Literature in Leipsic. It is a sufficiently arrogant composition, but contains much truth offensively expressed. The following is worth noting:

"There is no trace to be found in Shakespeare of that religious narrowness and hypocrisy which had made religion to the present–day Englishman a social matter and one of external form, but such a beautiful toleration that even today one is in doubt as to his belief, and rightly attributes to him religious indifferentism."

I have no doubt that the excellent Mr William Shakespeare attended his parish church with sufficient regularity, & held those who objected to doing so on alleged grounds of conscience as a poor pitiful folk, not deserving the attention of any healthy–minded Englishman.

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