The Henson Journals

[50]

10th Sunday after Trinity, August 20th, 1922.

[^written in Greek^]

With this stern & cryptic sentence Christ concludes some of the 'hardest' of His sayings: and these are immediately followed by the charming narrative of His receiving & blessing the children. He had spoken on the vexed question of divorce, & had provoked a protest from the disciples. [^written in Greek^]. To this our Lord replied rather surprisingly [^written in Greek^], and then added the strange utterance about eunuchs. He seems to place His law of marriage among the 'counsels of perfection', which would be outside the attainment of the general body of His disciples. It was certainly above the accepted standard of His Jewish contemporaries, but at no time has the Christian conscience sanctioned a repudiation of it in the case of Christians. From time to time in the case of important individuals the question of the lawfulness of polygamy for Christians has been debated. Philip of Hesse, Henry VIII, and Chares II are notorious examples; and there have been individual casuists who have gone great lengths in the direction of a Jewish laxity: but the main stream of Christian testimony has insisted on treating Christ's Law of marriage as universally obligatory, though He Himself seems to recognize its extraordinary character.

[51] [symbol]

August 20th, 1922.

My dear Talbot,

I have taken up my pen several times during the last few days with the intention of writing to you, and the laid it down again with the feeling that, perhaps, even the best–intentioned words might be resented in a trial so sudden and so severe as that which has befallen you. 'The heart knoweth its own bitteress, & a stranger doth not intermeddle with the joy thereof'. And yet there is something worth having in the knowledge that one's own griefs touch and distress the minds of one's friends, and these last claim a prerogative of sympathy which they cannot easily bring themselves to forego.

So I take leave to tell you how distressed I am that you and your wife should have lost your son in this untoward & most unexpected calamity. On Bishop Westcott's grave in Auckland Chapel is inscribed (by his own expressed desire) the great words. 'Ego veni ut vitasm habeant' [I came that they may have life]; & it is the Truth which those Words enshrine which will comfort you in your sorrow. In the long run Christ wins though, and Life not Death at last prevails.

Believe me, my dear Talbot.

with much sympathy, yours

Herbert Dunelm:

[52] [symbol]

The poisoning of a whole party of visitors in a Highland hotel by some potted paste in sandwiches is a tragedy as disconcerting as it is extraordinary. It is difficult to imagine a more distressing method of losing one's son than this which has robbed Talbot of his boy. There was something noble & stirring about the young man's death in battle which mitigated the sorrow, but to be ignobly poisoned on a holiday is squalid and unrelieved. "The economy of Heaven is dark"

We drove to the parish church at Bishopton. The service, which did not exceed an hour in length, was conducted by a very young looking man dressed as a layman. He preached extemporaneously, with little connexion of ideas and no grace of diction. I conjectured that he must be a student taking duty for the minister during his absence on holiday. The congregation numbered less than 120, and consisted mostly of women. Though there were not more than a dozen children present, there was a fatuous hymn called "the Children's hymn" which might have been thought unworthy for Divine Service. The Choir consisted of young women and older men. Why is it that, though the crudities of Presbyterianism are commonly excused as natural in so virile a version of Christianity, there is no Church in which women hold so prominent a place in the worship? Men guard the bason at the door into which the money is thrown, but women fill the pews, & lead the praise!

[53] [symbol]

Jupiter Carlyle was offered the Church of Cockburnspath in 1747, when he was 25 years old. "As my father & grandfather were always against resisting Providence, I was obliged to accept of it. It was an obscure distant place, without amenity, comfort, or society, where if I had been settled, I would have more probably fallen into idleness & dissipation than a course of study; for preferment is so difficult to be obtained in our Church, & so trifling when you have obtained it, that it requires great energy of mind not to fall asleep when you are fixed in a country charge. From this I was saved, by great good luck". The truth of this comment on the Scottish system cannot be disputed. Much the same description might be given of the situation in England so far as the greater part of the clergy are concerned.

Carlyle denies the common opinion that the Scots have no humour.

"Since we began to affect speaking a foreign language, which the English dialect is to us, humour, it must be confessed, is less apparent in conversation. The ground of this pretension in the English to the monopoly of humour is their confounding characters together that are quite different – the humourist & the man of humour. The humourist prevails more in England than in any country, because liberty has long been universal there, & wealth very general, which I hold to be the father and mother of the humourist. This mistake has been confirmed by the abject humour of the Scotch, who till of late years, allowed John Bull, out of flattery, to possess every quality to which he pretended"

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