The Henson Journals

[123]

Friday, February 12th, 1926.

The law of God, which is the key wherewith men bind, and the promises, which are the keys wherewith men loose, have our hypocrites also taken away. They will suffer no man to know God's word, but burn it, and make heresy of it: yea, and because the people begin to smell their falsehood, they make it treason to the king, and breaking of the king's peace, to have so much as their Pater Noster in English. And instead of God's law, they bind with their own law: and instead of God's promises, they loose & justify with pardons and ceremonies, which they themselves have imagined to their own profit.

v. Tyndale. "Obedience." p. 243.

How irresistible was this denunciation in 1528! How flat it falls in 1926! What is the explanation? I suppose it is impossible for us to feel towards the Bible as Tyndale & his sympathisers felt. It is certainly impossible for us to read the perplexed situation, which confronted the ecclesiastical authorities in his time, quite so simply. We know too much about the subsequent progress of events to take either side at its own valuation.

[124]

The Reformers exaggerated the place which the Bible is capable of holding in a well–ordered Christian life, or rather they left out of their religious scheme much that was really indispensable. It was not merely that they rejected the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, but that they belittled the entire system of edification of which the Apostles had lain the main lines before a syllable of the New Testament had been written. The intense bitterness which marked the controversy between Reformers and Catholicks was caused by the violence done to devotional sentiment even more than by the difference of intellectual standpoint. The Word was the substitute, not only for the Church, but also for the Mass. What was his most intimate contact with the present Christ to the Catholick, was roughly stigmatised as "idolatry" by the Protestant. How was it possible to build a bridge over the chasm, emotional as well as intellectual, which parted the adherents of the Medieval Church, from the adherents of the Reformation? The Jesuits set themselves to deepen &, so to say, rationalize the emotional chasm. Hence the measureless ferocity of the conflicts of the Counter–Reformation.

[125]

I received from Wright a request that he might present two boys for confirmation who were no more than 12 years of age, "as an experiment". I refused to depart from the diocesan rule. After breakfast, I dictated some more of the lecture, and then added a few touches to the "Tyndale" lecture which I gave at Newcastle, and sent it to Hodder and Stoughton.

In the afternoon Marr of Hebburn brought a boy, Albert Arthur Whiteley, to be confirmed. The whole family came with him. They are actors, & ever on the move at home and abroad. But all have been confirmed save one, Raymond, who is not old enough. After the service in the Chapel, I showed them the House, and gave them tea. Two lads, as I thought, for they certainly looked no more than 17 or 18, turned out to be young men of 24 and 22! They performed acrobatic feats, & played on the piano & fiddle. The younger of the two also "impersonated females".

I received from the Bishop of S. Alban's quite a grateful note in acknowledgment of my refusal to accept his recalcitrant deacon for Ordination to the priesthood. His Lordship denies all intention of oppressing Modernists!

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