The Henson Journals
Sun 27 December 1925
Volume 40, Pages 49 to 50
[49]
Sunday after Christmas, December 27th, 1925.
The Reformation coincided, as is well known, with the beginning of the process by which political power was gradually extended from kings & nobles to the trading & middle classes; theologically it was a return to earlier purity of doctrine based mainly upon the teaching of St Paul. Our own century is witnessing a further extension of political power by the enfranchisement of the proletariat: there are not wanting signs that it may be accompanied by a further reformation of religion by a return, not to the teaching of the great apostle, but to his still greater Master, and by the application to every sphere of man's activity of the principles of the Lord Jesus Himself.
v. Binns. Erasmus the Reformer. p.55.
Does a right understanding of the Mind of Christ really lead us to the now fashionable exaltation of the "group mind," and the complete indifference to the claims of the private conscience, of the family, and of patriotism?
[50]
The last Sunday in the year was an idle Sunday, and this was as well as might be, since I had a cold hanging about me & felt little disposed for exertion of any kind. The weather had becomes milder, a rapid thaw was in progress, & much of the snow had already vanished.
I celebrated the Holy Communion in the Chapel at 8a.m. During the morning I wrote a number of letters, and again after lunch I walked round the Park with Linetta. The streams were all flowing abundantly. I wrote to Gilbert and Fawkes. Also I sent p.c. photographs of myself to Tom Hay & Fred. J. Smith. While we were at dinner, the Salvation Army came and sang carols outside the dining–room window. I went out, thanked them, and gave them ten shillings. After dinner I retired to my study, and read in W. P. Ker's "Collected Essays" a brief luminous study of Pascal. In it, he speaks of, "that background of a customary and reasonable piety which was a second nature" in Pascal's century. It is, precisely, that back–ground which the XVIIIth century lost, which was partially recovered in the XIXth and appears to have been lost again in the XXth.