The Henson Journals

[19]

Tuesday, June 29th, 1926.

A brilliant and very hot summer's day. Beyond moving about the garden, and showing the Castle to Dr McCullagh & the young doctor who is doing duty while "Dr Cecil" is on holiday, I did nothing, beyond reading and writing a few letters.

I received an interesting letter from Bishop Knox. He says that hitherto he has not allowed his mind to dwell on the possibility of finding himself driven to organize a separation from the Church of England, but that sometimes he fears that he will have to face that contingency. He also, like Fawkes, urges me to read the Life of Father Dominic.

I finished reading "La Vierge Marie par Louis Coulanges", another of the little volumes of the series "Christianisme". It traces with admirable restraint and lucidity the development of the Roman dogma from its roots in the Gospels to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception defined in 1854. The two dominating factors have been the apocryphal literature of the early Church, and the crude devotions of the multitude. The Church of England is but rehearsing on the petty insular stage the course which the Church Catholick has pursued through the centuries. First, the popular culture: then the formal doctrine and official authorisation. There is, of course, this difference, that while the Catholick development was natural, the Anglican is artificial. The popular demand is deliberately manufactured in the interest of the Romanising policy which our "Anglo–Catholicks" have adopted. But, however started and moti[ved?], the same process is observable. First, the popular demand: then, the official action. The claim and name of an "Ecclesia docens" are utterly unreal in both cases, consciously unreal in the case of the English Church.

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