The Henson Journals

[166]

Friday, June 16th, 1922.

I made a summary of the sermon I propose to preach on Sunday, and sent it to the "Yorkshire post". The question raised therein ought to be in men's minds now. At last the demand for my super–tax arrived, & I sent a cheque for the amount – £739:1:6 – forthwith.

Clayton and I motored in to Durham, & there I presided at a meeting of the Religious Education Board. The business was formal, and soon despatched. Then I had tea with the Bishop & Mrs Quirk, after which I returned to Auckland. Before dinner I played bowls, and was woefully beaten by William!

Dr Morison, the zealous leader of the "Boys Brigade", writes to me plaintively that my commendation of the Church Lads Brigade has damaged his inter-denominational organization! The poor man is woefully mistaken if he thinks that a Bishop's word has the smallest influence one way or the other! However I wrote to him a mild platitudinous letter, which will give him little comfort, but, I hope, less offence! This rivalry of the two methods emerges at every turn. The clergy will not work heartily on any other lines than their own, and it is not really worth while trying to drive them on to other lines, which, albeit in themselves sounder, are yet so little liked that they are not frankly accepted. The clergy are like the Jesuits – Sint ut sunt aut non sint!

[167] [symbol]

June 16th, 1922.

My dear Sir Thomas Oliver,

I am greatly obliged to you for sending me your valuable & interesting paper on Alcohol in Relation to Industrial Hygiene & Efficiency, which I have read with the close attention which anything from your pen deserves to command, and does receive from me.

The evidence against alcohol seems almost always to amount to evidence against the excessive consumption of alcohol, and leaves the question of its moderate use unaffected. It did not enter into your argument to consider the incidental and indirect consequences of total abstinence on such a society as ours, with such a history & such habits.

It is precisely here that my gravest misgivings as to Prohibition & every policy approaching thereto emerge. Frankly, I don't like the ηθοѕ of total abstainers: they seem to me as a class lop–sided & prejudiced folk, who are not as well–equipped with civic good sense as others. I am of course aware that many individual total abstainers are admirable citizens, but they seem to me to be such in spite of their total abstinence.

Then I suspect that the case against Alcohol is really based on the morbid drinking created by some ill features of industrialism – monotony, bad housing, over-fatigue tc. The use of distilled liquids is, I think, historically associated with industrial society, appearing first in Holland, the earliest industrialised community of Europe & having its [168] principal expression in the Anglo–Saxon communities in which industrialisation has gone farthest.

Wines, beer, & cider – which might by comparison be called natural alcoholic beverages – do not seem to me to lie open to the suspicions which attach to distilled liquids. Excess, of course, is always mischievous, but that holds also for non–alcoholic drinks.

You don't go into the question of drugs, as alternatives to drink, a subject on which I should value your opinion; but it seems hopeless to get at the facts in America.

Yours sincerely,

Herbert Dunelm:

"I think I never have written for writing sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult – viz. to express clearly & exactly my meaning; this has been the motive principle of all my corrections and re-writings. When I have read over a passage which I had written a few days before, I have found it so obscure to myself that I have either put it altogether aside or fiercely corrected it; but I don't get any better for practice. I am as much obliged to correct and rewrite as I was thirty years ago".

J. H. Newman, April 13th, 1869

(v. Letters & Correspondence, vol. II, p. 477)

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