The Henson Journals

[85]

Wednesday, December 12th, 1923.

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A confirmation address is in some respects the most difficult kind of preaching. The audience is composed of very young people, too young to follow an argument or to appreciate quality of speech: yet old enough to be both intelligent and morally sensitive. It is a great occasion in their lives, answering to baptism in the early church, and to what is called "conversion" among Protestants. Yet Confirmation is one of the hackneyed conventions of life among a large number of English folk: and, as such, it does not easily connect itself with the reason or with the conscience. For the Bishop, confirmation is his only personal link with the greater part of the people: and his address, therefore, has a directness and a solemnity which have no parallels in his other ministries. There is a further consideration which will weight with him. Parents & friends will gather to the Confirmation of their children, and their minds & consciences will be more than usually responsive, for, though the majority will be religious people, there will certainly be some who have been "drawn to" the function less by conviction than by the kindly custom. The address to the candidate may be the most effective kind for preaching for the witnesses of the confirmation. Yet the range of subject is necessarily limited, & the Bishop, especially if his diocese be large & the confirmations many, will be repeating himself in a measure not helpful to his own sincerity, and enormously trying to the chaplains and clergy.

[86]

I went in to Durham, and confirmed 53 boys in the Cathedral. Of these all but three were from the School. The three others were choristers of the Cathedral. I walked down the hill, and was waylaid by Gray, the tailor, who is an ardent Freemason and Rotarian. Then old Rushworth seized me, and, having presented me with a framed cutting from an illustrated paper exhibiting me in canonicals blessing a War–Memorial, lured me inside his fatal shop, from which I only emerged after ordering a table for fourteen guineas! Clayton and I lunched with the Bishop of Jarrow, & then returned to Auckland in time for the car to carry Ella to New Shildon where she had undertaken to open a Sale of Work.

Mr Lane–Davies, the Vicar–designate of South Westoe, with his mother arrived to dine and sleep at the Castle. He was a prisoner in Germany for some months. His verdict on his gaolers is not unfavourable. There was no intentional brutality, but they were hard–pressed for victuals, & the prisoners did not fare better or worse than themselves. He spent some time with the Army in Palestine where he formed the opinion that the Zionist policy was incapable of success. The Jewish immigrants were largely composed of criminal types, who required the oversight of troops to be restrained form pillaging the residents! It would appear that the modern Jews carry into Palestine the same appropriating passion as marked the Jews who first made it "the Holy Land"!

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