The Henson Journals

[197]

Monday, March 29th, 1926.

I paid another visit to the dentist: & the doctor was in attendance. Having been deprived of 3 more teeth, and being thereby rendered both dumb & hideous, I returned to the Castle, & passed the rest of the day in such discomfort as may be better imagined than described.

Miss Ironside, the Head Mistress of the High School in Sunderland, wrote to thank me for my address at the Confirmation in S. Peter's, last Tuesday. "The address was simply perfect, & I can't tell you how I enjoyed it, & how appreciative the parents were, & how full of it it [sic] the girls. And to have had the privilege of each one going to you alone for the laying on of hands was a wonderful happening." There were only 43 candidates so I was able to confirm them individually. Miss Ironside is a much respected & experienced teacher, so I allow myself to appreciate her approval of the Address. One of the difficulties of a Bishop's work is that he is hardly ever able to learn how it impresses competent judges. There is, of course, a vast amount of subterranean & ill–natured discontent among the baser sort of the clergy: but this is rarely sufficiently audible to catch the bishop's ear.

[198] [symbol]

I wrote to the Glasgow minister McLelland, & cancelled my engagement to preach & lecture on April 11th & 12th, feeling in doing so that I was not acting heroically, and yet not feeling equal to the task of preparing the work. It is the preparation that forms the real burden of all this preaching & lecturing: and, though few will believe it, I am a slow worker.

Also, I wrote to the Broadcasting People in Newcastle, and cancelled my engagement to preach on Whitsunday. It would involve my hurrying back from Hereford, and making it impossible to for me to get anything worth calling a holiday then.

I read much of Pastor's Popes. He is not a great historian, but he impresses me as an honest, though partial and prejudiced, writer. It is certainly worth while [sic] to read the story of the Reformation from the Papal point of view. The perspective is curiously different. But the amazing contempt into which the Papacy had fallen, even among its own adherents, is very apparent. Charles V loathed the Protestants, and was himself a devout Catholick, but his dislike of Paul III was unconcealed, and sometimes expressed with vehemence.

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