The Henson Journals

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Thursday, August 4th, 1921.

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What will be the future of Anglicanism? The repudiation of national autonomy in religion involves the acceptance of another authority which shall replace the national authority as final in rebus ecclesiasticis. What shall that authority be? The Tractarians would have made some attempt at an answer by appealing to the "primitive church", and there are still those who would adopt that position, & proceed to the task of defining the 'primitive church' – an indispensable task, for an indefinite, undefined Authority is no authority at all. The definitions, however, vary, for it is quite impossible to fix a point at which the Church ceased to be "primitive" & became something else: it is also quite impossible to defend such an exaltation of what is 'primitive' as the theory implies. More recently, the "Anglo–Catholics" have fastened on the year 1054 as indicating the point up to which the belief & practice of the Church must be held to be authoritative for the guidance of modern Anglicans. But this date seems not less arbitrary than the "first six centuries" which the Tractarians favoured, & to have this additional disadvantage that its acceptance would disallow the whole procedure of the English Reformation, and commit the Church of England to a tradition which included the corruptest habit of the Christian Church. Moreover, the selection of a year fails to solve the problem: for the Catholic tradition up to 1054 is unformulated and generally unknown. For the guidance of modern Anglicans no authority of which this can be said is of any practical value. Is every Anglican to formulate for himself?

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I spent the morning in a rather fruitless effort to write the Preface: & I wrote my weekly letter to Carissima. In the afternoon we were taken to see Dunster, a singularly beautiful village crowned by the castle, where, since the end of the 14th century, the Luttrells have reigned, and adorned with a quaint erection, a market of some sort, bearing the date 1647. We visited the parish church of S. George, a noble structure bisected by a very finely carved wooden screen with rood–loft, which ran right across the nave, separating it completely from the choir. This was executed in the end of the 15th century in obedience to a ruling of the Bishop to settle a dispute between the monks & the parishioners. There was an earlier screen, also noteworthy, in the southern chapel. The tower made an imposing figure. We had tea in the Luttrell Arms, a medieval building once monastic. The richness of the South in ecclesiastical fabrics as compared with the North is in impressively indicated by such parish churches as those of Minehead and Dunster, within two or three miles of one another.

There is a statement in the newspapers that the output of coal is again normal for last week, i.e. about 4,300,000 tons. How long shall we be permitted to go on before another strike stops the industry?

Two well–known public men, Sir Charles Seeley, and Sir Harry Wilson, were washed off their yachts yesterday in the Solent, & rescued with some difficulty. The Morning Post publishes a piquantly–worded letter addressed by Henry Arthur Jones to J.G. Wells. It appears that the last threatens the first with a libel action on account of a volume entitled "My dear Wells", which is about to appear.

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