The Henson Journals

[64]

Thursday, May 24th, 1923.

Where things have been instituted, which being convenient and good at the first, do afterwards in process of time wax otherwise; we make no doubt but they may be altered, yea, though councils or customs general have received them.

… For there is not any positive law of men, whether it be general or particular; received by formal express consent, as in councils, or by secret approbation, as in customs it cometh to pass; but the same may be taken away if occasion serve. Even as we all know, that many things generally keep heretofore are now in like sort generally unkept & abolished everywhere.

Hooker. Eccl. Pol: IV. xiv (.I. G14)

Hooker is justifying the Elizabethan settlement, & assumes the right of the national authority to be the power by which such departures from established procedure are authorized & carried out. The fact that the settlement had stood so long, some 40 years ago, showed,

'that God would at leastwise by tract of time teach the world, that the thing which he blesseth, defendeth, keepeth so strongly, cannot choose but be of him?'

This argument proved something like a boomerang in the disastrous period 1640 – 1660.

[65]

The Right Hon: Thomas Ferens came to lunch. He has attained to wealth and prominence in Hull, but he retains a loyal attachment to Bishop Auckland where he was brought up. He told me that from the time when he was a clerk working in an office, he had followed the rule of devoting one tenth of his income to good work; that since he had become a wealthy man, he had devoted the whole of his profit: and now that he was drawing to his end, he was disposing of much of his capital in the same way. This is very excellent: of course he is not an Anglican, but some kind of Methodist!

Wynne–Willson and Knight arrived to shepherd the Ordination candidates, and then came the candidates themselves. There are but seven all told, 2 priests, and 5 deacons. Of the latter all but 4 hail from Knutsford. It would seem that the normal sources provide now hardly any candidates at all.

After dinner I examined Laudreth, one of the deacons, in Hooker. He had evidently read the whole of the Ecclesiastical Polity, and done so intelligently.

Knight had much talk with me before going to bed. He gives a woeful account of the clergy in his rural deanery. All of them are dispirited: most of them are ignorant & idle: few of them are intelligent or capable of learning. Their influence on the population is almost negligible. Religion is at a very low ebb in the whole district, and the churches are empty.

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