The Henson Journals

[119]

Tuesday, January 17th, 1922.

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More snow fell during the night. The weather through the day was fine and cold. The Headlams took their departure after breakfast: and I worked at the Commemoration Sermon.

I wrote to Spooner at Oxford: and to Geoffrey Gordon in Edinburgh, with reference to B.A. as Pringle finally declined my proposal.

I finished reading Raleigh's Annals. It is quite clear that he had definitely abandoned not only belief in, but also preference for Presbyterianism, and that he had come to accept Establishment as probably expedient and certainly permissible. The disgust which a man of wide culture & large understanding must needs feel with the almost incredibly narrow bigotry, & puerile superstition of the Scottish presbyterians is everywhere apparent in his book. The Episcopal Church of Scotland ought to circulate copies to all and sundry. But I doubt whether Raleigh has done justice to his countrymen. There must have been more in their case than they were able to state. In crude ways & with grotesque arguments they were asserting principles that are true, & claiming rights that are integral to self–respect. After all, the harvest discloses the value of the seed: & Raleigh himself is a type, one of the very best, which could hardly have grown on any other stock. Who that knows them both, and possesses any power of independent judgment, would place the Scottish Episcopalian above the Scottish Presbyterian? Intellectually and morally the first is less estimable than the last. If the Scottish genius be, as all will admit it to be, a valuable asset to the State, which system can better claim the credit for feeding & fostering it? Exorbitantly and odiously intolerant as the Presbyterians of Scotland have been, which system & set of principles has had the most genuinely tolerant men, theirs or those of Archbishop Laud? It is clear to me that we must be slow to give place to the sentiments of dislike & disgust with which these dour fanaticks inevitably fill our minds. Everything that was picturesque & polite was with the system that failed in Scotland, but the failure was due neither to the picturesqueness nor to the politeness, but to something that went deeper, & carried farther. It was absolute and unteachable.

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