The Henson Journals

[213]

Good Friday, April 2nd, 1926.

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Go into a picture gallery, and ask whose that rosy full–fed face may be, looking out from those rounded and frilled canonicals, and you are told it is Bishop So–and–So, an eminent divine; and then one thinks of the Author of the Revelation, the only person, I believe, besides our Anglicans, who has been thought worthy of that title.

Froude. "The Nemesis of Faith" p.49.

I felt like that 40 years ago, and at intervals I feel like that still. But it is a barren protest against actualities which may not be finally resisted or ignored. You have to choose between the heartless sensuousness and sensualism of the Renaissance, and the heartless persecution of the Counter–Reformation. Under the brilliance of the one, and the asceticism of the other: the laboring poor suffer cruelly. Leo X was no more baleful or remote from them than Paul IV., and vastly more intelligible and attractive. Of course, there is the next world to be thought of, but for that, the miseries of the poor may be actually advantageous. Paul IV would have told them so: & Leo X would have dismissed the subject with a sceptical [sic] smile.

[214]

The Georgian clergy were gross, but kindly and tolerant. They were good neighbours, and professed a religion of pedestrian virtue, which had indeed no use for enthusiasm or asceticism, but paid its debt & gave alms to the poor. Their criticks – Evangelical & Tractarian – were ardent, dogmatick, self–tormenting rather than unselfish, spiritually arrogant, but uncomfortable to live with, & very indifferent to the more obvious practical obligations, the stuff of which fanaticks and persecutors are made. Who shall say that they came nearer to the secret of the Cross than their secular–minded predecessors? The Cross is the supreme demonstration of Divine Love, and what understanding of that Love was there in the crude dogma of the Atonement which the Evangelicals professed and nauseam, or in the naked horror of the Crucifix, which the Tractarians upheld in a sustained exstasy of unreason? A religion of duty, which clothes with Divine significance the humble tasks of life, and powers the spirit of self–sacrificing service into the magical contacts of society, might, perhaps, justify itself as an expression of the Religion, which must always be essentially, what first it was confessedly a discipleship of the Son of Man.

[215] [symbol]

'Rounded and frilled canonicals' are as much, and as little, important as hair–shirts, tonsures, mitres, copes, & all the other fripperies of religious office. These things belong to the ever–changing secular frame–work in which Christian witness has to be made, & the work of the Christian Ministry preformed. There is a kind of superstition involved in the prominence which asceticks & reformers ever give to them externals. The essential question is whether or not the Mind of Christ is finding recognizable expression through them. We all come on to an encumbered scene, in which our liberty of action is extraordinarily small: & if we spend our energies in trying to alter the inherited conditions of our service, it may be that we shall finally do not service at all. It is surely better to accept the conditions, and thus to serve. Is not this part of the lesson of Incarnation? "The Son of Man came eating & drinking" i.e. not in the way of the Asceticks. And is not this acceptance of conditions awfully authenticated by Crucifixion? "Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death: yea, the death of the Cross." But, then, how easily this acceptance of conditions ensnares us when the conditions are easy! The Religion of the Cross can never be a comfortable Religion.

[216]

Julius III, gave the painful impression that, instead of retiring within himself in prayer and contemplation, he gave himself up in a more ingenuous manner, like the great nobles of the Renaissance period, to the amusement of comedies, court jesters and card playing. The "Hilaritas publica" which one of his medals extols, was not in place at a time when the faithful Catholic chronicler, Johann Oldecop, had this inscription placed on his house in Hildesheim: "Duty has ceased, the Church is convulsed, the clergy has gone astray, the devil rules, simony prevails, the Word of God remains for all eternity."

Pastor. Hist: of Popes. xiii. 156.

My Good Friday was as unedifying as it was comfortless. Lionel was at Gateshead helping the clergy there, and I could not myself read service. So there were no devotions in the chapel beyond my own. The weather was brilliant but unseasonably warm. Perhaps for this reason, I felt faint in the evening, & retired to bed in no small discontent.

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