The Henson Journals

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Easter Monday, April 2nd, 1923.

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Lives of great men all remind us,

As the pages o'er we turn,

That we're apt to leave behind us

Letters that we ought to burn.

This parody expressed Dr Crozier's opinion in biographies. He was moved to produce it by his perusal of Bishop Wilberforce's 'Life'. Probably the world would lose nothing if all one's private letters were committee to the flames after perusal, and all journals & sermons had the same fate after their author's death. Very few men are really great enough to be legitimately interesting to their contemporaries & successors. Only an unusually tough self–conceit can miss the moral of the years, which relegates every man to his proper place in the world's regard. Scandal will clothe insignificance with a momentary importance: but there is neither worth nor permanence in that kind of success. Biography must justify itself by the genuine greatness of its subject, or by the public importance of its record, and these in most cases run together. The great man in himself is more often than not alo the man whose life is important. Private letters, since correspondence became the general habit, facilitated by cheap postage & typists, has lost most of its former value. It cost little to produce: it had no real value at the time: its permanent significance is commonly nothing at all.

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'Convocation is too utterly ridiculous a farce for me to play it any longer. For the last seven years we bishops have been sitting in the back attic of the Church grandly discussing the papering of it, with the house on fire in the kitchen, and burglars breaking in at the parlour windows. And for this and other matters verily we shall have our reward, and that speedily, unless there be no such thing as a Nemesis for timidity."

Abp. Magee. April 2nd 1880. (Life. ii. 129)

Alexander Knox called the Church of England "the most good–natured Church in the World"!

Father Tyrrell, writing to Lord Halifax in 1903, described caustically 'the extreme "ecclesiasticism" of some of your men, more Roman than Rome herself.' "To that sort of Catholicism may England never be converted." In 1907 he writes with reference to M r Rickards, who had treated of Reunion in the "Church Times":–

"He evidently belongs to that school of Anglicans who cling to (and imitate) all that is most perishable, moribund, & impossible in the Roman system; to all its "uncatholicism"; to sacerdotalism; to sacramental materialism: to moral & ritualistic casuistry and rabbinism: to theological obscurantism: to every "dead & beggarly element" against which thte living & fruitful elements are struggling: to just that section or sect of Roman Catholicism which in secret entertains the most profound contempt for "the so–called Anglo–Catholic"

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and his "sham sacraments"! Such are the men who so often "go over to Rome" and add to the diseased elements of her constitution "converts" of the most violently ultramontane type."

(v. George Tyrrell's Letters. p. 132, 3)

Tyrrell knew what he was writing about.

A very wet day to the discomfiture of holiday–makers. In the course of the morning a party of 'sea–scouts' from Rooker came to the Castle, and I showed them round. Wilkinson & his son, Lionel, came to lunch. The young man aspires to be ordained. Also, Shaddick from New Shildon lunched here. I discussed with him the case of Captain Morris Young, & he undertook to write to him.

Clayton & I walked for more than an hour in the Park in spite of the rain, which fell heavily all the afternoon.

I wrote to Canon Storr on "Liberal Evangelicalism". The book is compared by a very friendly reviewer in the "Guardian" with 'Lux Mundi', but I do not think it will make such a stir, and this for 3 reasons. 1. There is no Evangelical public sufficiently informed & interested to discuss the issues raised. 2. Neither 'Liberal Evangelicals' nor 'Evangelical Liberals' are organized or popular. 3. All questions of religion have fallen into the background of public concern. In a secularist age, hag–ridden by fear of social revolution, who cares about Evangelicalism?

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