The Henson Journals
Fri 25 November 1921
Volume 31, Page 54
[54]
Friday, November 25th, 1921.
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The newspaper reports of yesterday's proceedings in the so–called "National Assembly" are extremely brief. It is apparent that the Press has made up its mind that they are worth little as "copy". We must make our count with the fact that there is no wider effect than that which is made on the Assembly itself to be expected from our speeches. Since I must always be in a minority, that effect in my case must always be practically nil. The morning was heavily wasted in discussing a motion for creating a Council on "Social" questions: & the afternoon in dealing with dull & ancient subject of Dilapidations. At 4.15 p.m. the Committee on Church Property met in the 2.A.B. Board Room with Lord Cave in the chair. Headlam and I walked together to the Athenaeum. I dined in the Club, and afterwards read rapidly through a foolish novel "The Fruit of the Tree". It startled me to see "Bishop Henson and Bishop Gore" bracketted in its pages as the final illustrations of the self–stultifying incoherence of the Church of England!
I lunched in the Club with Canon Bickersteth, quondam Vicar of Leeds, now Canon of Canterbury. He told me some of his experiences in visiting Japan. English was spoken very generally but sometimes with odd mistakes. Thus a Hospital managed by the missionaries announced that "it harboured all kinds of disease, and paid no respect to Religion". He expressed his belief that the poverty of the clergy had been greatly exaggerated. Comparatively few, indeed, have more than a very modest income, but the cases of squalid indigence are not so frequent as the tragical descriptions in the newspapers would appear to imply. I am myself disposed to believe that there is much truth in this view. The clergy have not been unaffected by the general clamour for improved conditions: many of them have been rendered very restive by the contrast between their own small incomes and the exorbitant wages which artisans have been receiving during the War, and brief delusive "boom" of 1919.