The Henson Journals

[80]

Monday. May 1st, 1922.

An Ordination candidate, Wykes, came to be examined vivâ voce in Butler's Analogy, and I had some talk with him about the permanent value of that work, in spite of its evident relation to the issues & methods of a long obsolete controversy. I said that the Sermons were more practically serviceable today than the Analogy, for their subject–matter was always present & freshly interesting. Every person born into the world offers the baffling problem of human nature in a new & challenging form.

The reception for the new Vicar made an ill start, for the reverend gentleman could nowhere be found, when the guests began to arrive. It emerged subsequently that he had been trying to assuage the resentment of diverse folk, who had been refused admission because they had no tickets!! However a heterogeneous company assembled & crowded the State room: most of them got tea in the Dining room: but probably not all.

After an early dinner we all went to the Edgar Hall, where the parishioners had been invited to meet their new Vicar. Out of the 17,000 there were perhaps 300 present! Most of them had been at the Castle in the afternoon. There is a melancholy lack of any parochial feeling in the people: and this has facilitated the congregationalism which is the temper of the system created by the Enabling Act. As a denomination the Church is lamentably, almost ridiculously, feeble in the parish.

[81]

Bishop Butler to the Countess of Hartford.

Summer of 1751.

'I had a mind to see Auckland before I wrote to your Grace, and, as you take so kind a part in everything which contributes to my satisfaction, I am sure you will be pleased to hear that the place is a very agreeable one, and fully answering expectations, except that one of the chief prospects, which is very pretty (the river Wear with hills, much diversified, rising above it), is too bare of wood; the park not much amiss as to that; but I am obliged to pale it anew all round, the old pale being quite decayed. This will give an opportunity, with which I am much pleased, to take in forty or fifty acres completely wooded; though with that enlargement it will scarce be sufficient for the hospitality of the country. These, with some little improvements and very great repairs, take up my leisure time.

Thus, Madam, I seem to have laid out a very long life for myself; yet, in reality, everything I see puts me in mind of the shortness and uncertainty of it: the arms and inscriptions of my predecessors, what they did and what they neglected, and (from accidental circumstances) the very place itself, and the rooms I walk through and sit in. And when I consider, on one view, the many things of the [82] kind I have just mentioned, which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But in another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do, or at least to begin: whether I am to live to complete any or all of them, is not my concern." (Fitzgerald 1xv.)

Butler was exactly the same age when he wrote this letter, as I am when I copy it into the journal. He died the year after. It may be that he had an intuition that death was near: indeed, all his life through, the thought of death was very familiar to him. He must have been an oddly incongruous figure in the Court of George II: though his detachment and reserve may have served to conceal from him its worst features. That Queen Caroline should have liked him is honourable to both. She was a hard woman, whom the world had hardened, but the ground tones of her character were true, & she honoured integrity when she found it. Her strong intelligence discovered the genuine greatness of the shy, silent clergyman, whom his friends held in such unusual regard, and she evidently distinguished Butler from the common type of sycophants in cassocks.

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