The Henson Journals
Sat 11 February 1922
Volume 31, Page 142
[142]
Saturday, February 11th, 1922.
Fine weather, but very cold. William reports some chance of selling the Argyll car. If he sells it to fair advantage, I shall be glad. Correspondence occupied all the morning. After lunch I walked in the Park with Ella. On returning to my room I began reading Foakes Jackson's "Introduction to the History of Christianity A.D. 590–1314." It is very interesting and well–arranged. This author is more at home in medieval Christendom than in primitive Christianity.
Mrs Danks sent me a posthumously published volume by her husband, the late canon of Canterbury – "The Gospel of Consolation". I knew him but slightly, but he was a close friend of Beeching, who used to speak often about him. It is not a new book, for it bears the date 1917 on the title page, & refers to Beeching as still Dean of Norwich. He represented a type of English Churchman which is practically extinct. It was the type which flourished in the latter half of Victoria's reign, and found its champion in Dean Stanley, its thinker in Whateley, and its statesman in Abp. Tait. The present Archbishop was supposed to be one its best representatives, but he ceased to have a will of his own, and is now the obedient instrument of the neo–Tractarians, of whom Temple is "the rising hope". Only a few elderly men, the survivors of a ruined host, now continue to attend the churches, which no longer appeal to them. George Macmillan is an example. The younger men of ability and education, even when they are interested in religion and respectful to it, have ceased to make any religious profession, & find sermons intolerable. The Establishment, which to the Liberal Anglicans of the past embodied an ecclesiastical ideal, the ideal of a genuinely National Church, now means nothing religious at all, only a very ineffectual and irrational machinery for organizing religion in the parishes.
The laity who have "found salvation" in the "Life and Liberty" movement are not intellectual in any sense, & most of them are ex–Dissenters and political Radicals.