The Henson Journals

[159]

Tuesday, September 13th, 1921.

A serious riot of the unemployed is reported from Liverpool. It was headed by a Baptist minister. This circumstance is certainly worth noting. The revolutionary sentiment is capturing all the "religious" leaders, as well established as "free". Once more the Christian Church is displaying its essentially parasitic character.

I read through the papers of the Modern Churchmen, which are published in the September issue of the "Modern Churchman": and I was relieved to find them far less extravagant and offensive than I had been led to expect. Their broad effect is undoubtedly to reduce Christ to the common level of humanity; for though His moral primacy is asserted very emphatically, and even the language of worship is employed with reference to Him, yet the Incarnation of God in Him is clearly represented as differing only in measure from the Incarnation of God in other men. It is impossible to recognize in this conception an adequate substitute for the orthodox doctrine. How on this view can Christ be properly made the object of Christian Worship, i.e. inseparably united with God in all worship? The 'Virgin Birth' and the 'physical Resurrection' are of course rejected: and all the roads by which the Apostolic Authors of the New Testament arrived at their belief in Christ's Divinity are traced, and disallowed. Lake and Foakes Jackson are indeed more or less decisively repudiated but the revised version of the traditional Faith which is offered differs only in degree from their disrespectful humanitarianism. The Roman divinisation of the Virgin Mary appears to be as spiritually valid as the belief in the Godhead of Jesus.

[160] [symbol]

Canon Bindley quotes a useful sentence from Westcott's Preface to "The Revelation of the Father":– "No formula which expresses clearly the thought of one generation can convey the same meaning to the generation which follows".

The formula must be changed, therefore, in order to perpetuate the meaning, but formulae acquire a vested interest in the reverence of the devout who repeat them, and the change of meaning is concealed by the sameness of the phrases. Men's temperaments are so different. Some can find spiritual comfort in controversial formularies. "For myself", wrote Cardinal Newman, 'I have ever felt it as the most simple & sublime, the most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth, more so even than Veni Creator and the Te Deum'.

The weather appears to have broken: it has been damp and chilly all day. William tried to cut the lawn with the motor–mower, which we had restored to activity: but the grass was too wet. Dorothy Parker and her two girls arrived on a visit. They are growing quite tall now: yet it seems but yesterday that I baptized them.

[Hearn's Collections, vol: xi.p.328 has a reference to the Man of Ross under date April 18th, 1734. Mr Matthew Gibson, minister of Abbey Dore in Herefordshire told Hearne that Mr Kirle "did a great deal of good, but that 'twas all out of vanity & ostentation, being the vainest man living, and that he always hated his relations etc".]

---