The Henson Journals

[176]

Wednesday, October 18th, 1922.

I worked at the Selby Abbey discourse all the morning. After lunch Ella, Clayton, and I motored to Fishburn, and there I dedicated a Mission Church, and preached. The building was crowded to suffocation. Then we motored to Castle Eden, where I consecrated an addition to the Churchyard. Lazenby was present as Registrar. I asked him what impression had been made in Newcastle by the Bishop's flirtation with Anglo–Catholicism, and he replied that it was unfavourable, but that everybody had so far lost heart and interest in the affairs of the Church that nobody could be induced to do anything more in protest against the sacerdotalist aggression. We motored back by way of Sherburn Hospital in order to carry Boutflower home. Lazenby himself, perhaps, illustrates the change in the attitude of the laity. Under the late Bishop of Newcastle he would have shared his lordship's attitude of determined hostility to an ecclesiastical party which was certainly disloyal to the legally established system, and probably committed to the maintenance of grave religious error. He has witnessed the total failure of that Bishop's efforts to restrain that party, & now that 'the wheel has gone full circle' and another Bishop of Newcastle condones, nay seems to approve, all that his predecessor disliked and condemned, he only feels a disgust too deep to consist with action.

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