The Henson Journals

[152]

Friday, March 2nd, 1923.

An archaeologist in Mesopotamia talked with an Arab lad who neither read himself or knew anyone who did: yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood within a stone's throw of the site where millenniums ago was one of the greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress!

v. Fosdick "Christianity and Progress".

I worked on the Penrith sermon; wrote letters, & read Fosdick's book, which was sent me presumably by the publishers. It is suggestive and, for an American book, well–written.

Atterbury's 'Directions for Confirmation' are printed as Appendix IV to Beeching's Life of Atterbury. They are worth reading for several reasons. They provide a precedent for the Bishop's fixing the age for candidates, and they show how the 'High' Churchmen clung to an early age.

'None are to be admitted to Confirmation but such who have been baptiz'd. None, that have already been confirm'd. None, who are not passed the 12th year of their age. None, but such as are well instructed &c.'

The Bishop's secretary issued Tickets seal'd with the Episcopal Seal, which had to be given up by the candidates to the Bp's Chaplain.

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