The Henson Journals

[139]

5th Sunday after Epiphany, February 5th, 1922.

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Snow on the ground, & very cold. I went to the parish church, which is a noble building hard by the rectory, and received the Holy Communion. The whole formula of administration was spoken once, and then the communicants were severally addressed with the first half of it. The effect was reverent enough. The College service was at 10.45 a.m., and was attended by a large concourse of students, & by the Mayor & Corporation as well as by the ordinary congregation. Before going to the church, the inevitable photographer appeared, & I was photographed alone with the Rector, and in a group. This performance made me mortally cold. The service was certainly impressive, & I think the sermon was well listened to. Schofield, the Principal, lunched at the Rectory. He said that for some years he had been a fairly regular member of my congregation at St Margaret's, Westminster. After lunch I had some talk with the Rector who gave me a very unsavoury account of St John's, Highbury, where he himself had been one of the teaching staff. The Evangelicals apparently act in precisely in the same spirit as the Jesuits, and sink to the same deeps of squalid fraudulency. Both the principal, Greenup, and the late Dean of Peterboro, Barlow, would seem to have done very base things in their zeal for the College, and the Party. I was irresistibly reminded of the picture of Maynooth given in "Father Ralph". Clearly, one must not assume that Jesuitry is monopolized by the Jesuits. The Mayor, & a number of the college teachers with some of the students came to tea, & I soon found myself engaged in a discussion of "Spiritualism", which has its miserable propaganda in Loughborough. The students attend, and 'rag' the mediums, but probably some of them "believe and tremble".

I preached at Evensong. The church was full, but not crowded. After service a young Indian student, who is a Brahmin, & the son of a prominent official, the Vice–Chancellor & Magistrate of Lucknow, came in, & we had much curiously interesting conversation about the situation in India. He said that he knew & admired Gandhi, who was opposed to democracy: that an anti–Brahmin society had come into existence in India, which was really Bolshevist: that the Christian missionaries were a disturbing factor in India: that 75 per cent of the Indian Civil Servants were offensive to the Indians: that Ld Chelmsford was weak and "thin–eared"; & generally that things were in a very bad state, & the outlook very black indeed.

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