The Henson Journals

[161]

Wednesday, September 14th, 1921.

"It is better to face the difficulties arising from the varied opinions of the competent than to remain among the worst confusions of unguided thought."

L. P. Jacks

"When once criticism has been started in a certain direction, and he most moderate degree of change suggested, the door is at once opened on the unknown. There is no controlling the reaction of other men's minds on a new idea or a new method: and if other men, employing the very method which we ourselves have introduced, reach, by its means, results which repel us, we have no right to condemn them harshly."

L. P. Jacks

Tyrrell's paper, "The point at issue", printed in the Hibbert Journal Supplement 1909, 'Jesus or Christ?', contains an effective comment on what is essentially Rashdall's position: "At most, then, Jesus would be the most Godlike of men. But man owes no adoration, no unqualified self–surrender even to the most Godlike of men – only to the absolutely Divine. Between God and Godlike the distance is infinite."

'John, the mystic dreamer, saw the depth and breadth of Divine love and the reality of Divine Sonship in Jesus; the shrewd and sensible Caiaphas did not; and it was impossible to bridge the gulf."

This is a luminous sentence from James Drummond's article in the same symposium, and it carries far.

[162]

I worked at a sermon to be preached at the institution of the new Vicar of S. Oswald's, Durham. It seemed a fitting occasion on which to make some reference to the Cambridge Essays in Creed–making. But, as soon as the task is actually attempted, its extreme difficulty becomes apparent.

After lunch everybody went into Durham except Ernest & I. We went for a walk, in the course of which I spoke to him seriously about his Ordination. If it is really his purpose to be ordained, then he ought not to postpone his carrying out of it indefinitely: for (1) such postponement cannot really be reconciled with a genuine belief in a Divine vocation: (2) it is imprudent to wait until his mental & moral muscles have grown stiff, & he is both reluctant to be taught, & incompetent to learn. (3) it is professionally unwise to waste any more time in beginning. The Bishop of Newcastle brought Ralph & Kitty, & himself stayed to dinner. He is an excellent straight fellow, in whom the improving influence of family responsibilities is very evident. He must keep young, & become sympathetic in order to hold & help his boys: and they more than compensate for the anxieties they cause. They are so many links between him and his people, so many points in which they find him interesting & intelligible. And besides all this, they give him, what no man really can dispense with, a continuing motive for exertion, an honourable & cogent reason for desiring to stand well with his neighbours, and a legitimate interest in what he does, & what he possesses, which does not end with himself. I, alas, am solitary, & self–centred.

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