The Henson Journals

[263]

Thursday, March 26th, 1925.

What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god–like reason

To fust in us unus'd.

Hamlet.

An excellent & a characteristic letter from Fawkes arrived. He approves highly of my Hibbert article, the proof of which I had sent him. "I wonder how our Healers get over our Lord's unwillingness to work wonders, & the small value he attaches to them? – an obviously genuine touch in the Gospels, which no editor could have put in. Are not Faith Healing and Numinousness both straws at which a drowning orthodoxy is clutching in despair?" Fawkes shares my amazement at Headlam's preface to Brilioth's book. It "reads like a mere exhibition of temper". In the 'Literary Supplement' there is a finely discriminating review of Brilioth's book, which makes no reference to the episcopal preface. I am wondering who can have written it. There are very few persons capable of writing with so much intimate knowledge, so much intellectual insight, & so much literary finish. Lord Ernle or John Bailey perhaps.

[264]

I turned away from the book on Spiritual Healing, and wrote a twenty–guinea article (1300 words) on the Church Assembly for the Evening Standard. This is the first of the six covenanted contributions.

I motored with Ella into Durham, and officiated at the funeral of Captain Rogerson in S. Oswald's & Bow Cemetery. There was a considerable gathering of people. Rogerson's loss will be felt in many directions, for, though not a man of outstanding ability, he was companionable & active.

Then I went to the Bishop of Jarrow, and talked over some matters of diocesan business with him. I had tea with the Cruickshanks, and then went to the Town Hall, where a meeting of the newly formed 'Durham Society' had been convened. The Papist Mayor presided, a pleasant, up–standing illiterate man, and Major Tarporley from Newcastle made a halting speech. I spoke "off the surface of my mind" for a quarter of an hour, and said little that was worth saying, but, perhaps, nothing that ought not to be said: & then the meeting ended. Ella & I returned to Auckland, where Gobat, the Socialist Vicar of St James' Darlington, came to dinner. He had been lecturing on some modern authors in a dissenting chapel under the chairmanship of Clayton.

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