The Henson Journals

[23]

15th Sunday after Trinity, September 28th, 1924.

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Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy church with thy perpetual mercy: and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation: through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

"Profitable to our salvation" – with the fading away of the next world with its hopes and fears, the words have lost much of their old reference. It suggests to us the Christian character as the object to be aimed at, not the joys of Heaven. And both Epistle and Gospel emphasize this meaning. S. Paul speaks in the one of "the marks of the Lord Jesus" which he "bears in his body", and in the other Christ prohibits the attempt to "serve two masters", and bids His disciples "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness". We know very little about the needs of our own characters, and it may well be the case that the very circumstances of our lives, against which we most chafe, and for the removal of which we may even most earnestly pray, are, did but we know it, the very 'things profitable to our own salvation', of which the Collect speaks. It was so with himself as S. Paul discovered when he prayed vainly for the removal of "the thorn in the flesh".

[24]

I went to the little Mission Church at Leeholme, where the conscientious though hardly erudite deacon, Petitjeen, ministers, and there celebrated the Holy Communion at 9.00 a.m. The service was semi–choral, and there were no less than 71 communicants, of whom a fair proportion were men. The general impression was one of earnestness & piety. As I returned I encountered a stream of papists coming back from Mass. Was it my fancy that they looked evilly at me? I expect there have been some uncomplimentary references to the Bishop of Durham in the Papist chapels since the Sunderland Sermon.

I motored to Bishopton, a little parish with a rural population of about 400, and I there preached at Evensong. There were about 140 people present, & they were very attentive. The churchwarden, a farmer, read the lessons, and I have rarely heard them read with more intelligence & feeling, though he was clearly an uneducated man. Reilly, the Vicar of Bishopton, was ordained in 1887, and is, therefore, exactly my own contemporary in Orders. He has been no less than 17 years in his present parish. The church is a modern building, but replaces an ancient one. After the service I returned immediately to the Castle, arriving at 8.45 p.m.

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