The Henson Journals

[87]

2nd Sunday after Epiphany, January 14th, 1923.

Public institutions have an almost pathetic character in these strange days when the clergy take pledges with the settled purpose of breaking them, and make declarations of assent and belief with the open admission that they do not mean them. Happily Sykes is an honest man, who still has some regard for his word, and some loyalty to the Church. But, then, he is past sixty, and perpetuates standards & ideals which the younger men can neither understand nor accept.

Ella, Wilson, Clayton, and I left the Castle at 9.45 a.m., and motored to Sedgefield, where I instituted Canon Sykes to the Rectory, and both preached and celebrated the Holy Communion. There were 116 cts. The beautiful church looked its very best in the bright sunlight, and everybody seemed to be bent on making the new start in the right spirit. After the service we all went to the Rectory for lunch, and then returned to Auckland.

I motored to Eldon, and preached to a crowd of mining folk in one of the "cheap and nasty" churches, which abound in the diocese of Durham. What a contrast with the glorious parish church at Sedgefield! The parson, Gray, has been there for 13 years. He was ordained by the Bishop of Hereford in 1890. The layman, whom I refused in the teeth of much pressure to ordain, read the lessons, and read them badly.

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