The Henson Journals

[194]

4th Sunday after Epiphany, February 1st, 1925.

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I celebrated the Holy Communion in the Chapel at 8 a.m. After breakfast I wrote to Castlereagh, William and George. I walked in the Park after lunch, & read. Voila tout! Julian Huxley's articles in the Spectator on 'America Revealed' are disconcerting. His study of 'Prohibition' is discriminating, but thoroughly hostile. When he tells me that Venus is being substituted for Bacchus, he confirms fears which one hardly ventures to confess. "Never has there been such a wide–spread disbelief in the orthodox creeds and moralities coupled with failure to erect new beliefs or standards in their place…In much of the West, the South–West and Pacific Coast especially, a shrewd and good–humoured paganism is coming to be the creed of the younger generation. It may well be that the Puritans were going to find themselves with another problem on their hands, the problem of love – more difficult than that of liquor, because liquor is manufactured externally, but love internally" [v. Spectator. Jan. 31st, 1925.]

The crude folly of "prohibition" has been stimulated and has, so to say, moralized sexual license. For Religion, discredited by its identification with the dull irrational tyranny of the churches, has forfeited its lawful authority in the region of morality.

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