The Henson Journals

[210]

Tuesday, October 31st, 1922.

A brilliant day but very cold. Colonel & Mrs Darwin left after breakfast, and I settled down to work at the Balliol sermon, but with curiously small success. Parry Evans came to see me about some extraordinary efforts to revive spiritual life in his Rural Deanery which the clergy are projecting. I gave an unenthusiastic approval! Then I motored into Durham, and had some talk with the Bishop of Jarrow.

I received from the London Library Mrs MacCunn charming book 'Sir Walter Scott's Friends". It is full of good things. Mrs Cockburn writes to David Hume:–

"I remember that, in spite of vain philosophy, of dark doubts, of toilsome learning, God had stamped his image of benignity so strong on thy heart that not all the labours of thy head could efface it".

What a charming world was that in which Scott lived, and in which he himself was the central and most brilliant figure! How immense was its capacity for enjoyment! How successful it was in forgetting or ignoring all that was going on outside itself! How completely absorbed in itself it managed to be! Religion decorated but did not disturb it! Politics amused and interested, but never perplexed or alarmed it! It lived in itself, for itself, by itself, to itself, a little world of close friends who swing the censer to one another ceaselessly.

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