The Henson Journals
Sat 3 April 1926
Volume 40, Pages 217 to 218
[217]
Easter Eve, April 3rd, 1926.
The Book of Common Prayer in its original form did away with everything which caused the Mass to appear as a sacrifice, but the second, on the other hand removed everything which could form an acknowledgment of the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament.
Pastor. Popes. xiii. 239.
This does not appear to me an unfair description of the two Edwardine books. The revision of the formula of administration of a doctrine of the Real Presence, though the 'Black Rubrick', which must be taken as an authoritative contemporanea expositio, is an important limitation of even this, modest retirement from the later Edwardine position. None the less, both Sacrifice and Real Presence are generally now assumed to be implicit in the Prayer Book.
I spent much of the morning with the dentist in the unpleasant but happily painless processes by which Art is enabled to provide some sort of a working substitute for nature.
An impudent paragraph in the Church Times informed me that my last article has appeared in the E.S. [218] An impudent post card bids me "follow Bp. Gore's Example." It is an odd mentality that these Catholicks zealots have.
The following new volumes of Loel's Classics arrived:
1. Tacitus. Histories I–III.
2. Seneca. Epistuloe Morales. III.
3. Plato. Lzysis, Symposium. Gorgias. V.
4. Plato. Cratylus. Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias
5. Aeschylus. Agamemnon, Libation–Bearers, Eumenides.
6. Dio's. Roman History VIII.
7. Diogenes Laertius I.
8. Diogenes Laertius II.
It was announced in the Times that Hugh Lyon had been appointed Rector of Edinburgh Academy. I wrote to congratulate him on what I imagine is notable success.
At 7 p.m. I visited the dentist again, & received a provision of fictitious teeth, which, he assured me, would enable me to celebrate tomorrow, & "tide me over the next few days." They revise my appearance, perhaps – as my wife generously suggests – to the general advantage, but none the less, not at all to my own contentment. However, such as they are, they stand between me & slow starvation, to say nothing of a sudden termination of my active ministry. What physical boon can compare with that of sound teeth?