The Henson Journals

[147]

Thursday, February 16th, 1922.

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If Temple and I both sit on the Committee for considering the answer which the Upper House should return to the E.C.U. petition, then there will be presented to the Church the piquant and edifying spectacle of two suspected hereticks charged with the guardianship of orthodoxy! Possibly our consenting to sit might be taken to indicate that no condemnatory statement was in contemplation. Certainly I would consent to nothing more than a pastoral pronouncement designed to reassure the faithful. This might, and in my opinion, should, contain a frank recognition of the need in which we all stand for some re–casting of our formularies & revision of our opinions. It should refer with approbation to serious attempts made by competent and religious men to provide for this need. Then, having sufficiently differentiated its procedure from that of the judge & censor, the Convocation of Bishops might go on to affirm the unaltering supremacy within the Christian Religion of the belief in Christ's plenary Godhead, & the necessity of that Belief for the justification of Christian worship, and the explanation of Christian experience. If this could be expressed with simple directness and reverent dignity, it might conceivably be of use to the parish clergy in re–assuring their perplexed people, & withstanding the Papal enemy. The Bishop of Liverpool is much perturbed about the latter. He says that Cardinal Gasquet has been to his diocese, & made a speech in which he prophesied the breaking–up of the Church of England within the next 20 years. His Eminence may be right. I cannot see how we can persist much longer in the singular state of internal dissidence which now exists. But 'threatened institutions live long', and we might be saved by a sufficient secession even now. The present policy of the Bishops appears to me precisely wrong. They are labouring to Anglicanize these "Anglo–Catholics" who are seeking to 'Romanize' the Church of England: & their method is resolutely to shut their eyes to the Romanizing, and to 'make the most of' the evangelistic zeal, and large professions of loyalty.

I have been asked to become a Vice–President of the Anglo–Catholic Mission which is being organized in Leeds: and I shall certainly refuse.

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