The Henson Journals

[20]

Wednesday, June 30th, 1926.

["]The choice for England was not between protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but between her own national life and authority and a religious system which claimed a kind of universal political jurisdiction.["]

Kennedy. Elizabethan Episcopal Administration. p. cciii

This is inaccurately stated. The author should have said that the choice between protestantism and Roman Catholicism carried with it the other choice. The general decline of religion, and especially of the Churches, has obscured the fact that the incompatibility of Roman Catholicism & healthy national life is inherent and perpetual. As the one waxes in the community, the other wanes. Yet this fact tends to be forgotten at a time when patriotic anxiety is most aroused, not by direct attacks on national independence as in the xvith century, but by the disintegrating influence of economic heresies. The strong absolutism of Rome seems to be the only form of Christianity organized with sufficient strength to make head [sic] against the forces of social Revolution. The strength is a delusion: for the violence of Revolution in Roman Catholick communities is all the greater for the temporary arrest which the Church can secure. Sooner or later the economic crash must come everywhere in Christendom.

[21]

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Mr Sam: Adams & Pemberton came to see me during the afternoon. They told me that 70,000 children are being fed at the expense of the rates in this county, & that about £10,000 is thus being expended every week. The general appearance of the children suggests that they are better fed during a strike than at ordinary times, when their parents are at work! None the less, the conventional description of starving children is freely employed to raise funds for the innocent victims of the Strike! It may be safely assumed that the excellently benevolent gentlemen (including Bishops Gore and Temple,) who telegraphed an urgent appeal to America in behalf of 4,000,000 starving miners' wives and children had no personal knowledge of the facts. They assumed the conventional picture of the innocent victims of a Strike. It is certainly the case that working people, even when abounding in prosperity, think of themselves as the piteously oppressed slaves of Capitalism. As Lord [Boyce?] says, the hardships and wrongs of a class are not resented by the generation which actually suffers them so much as by the later generation which inflames its imagination by reading about them! And the middle class is similarly misled by the classics of Christian Socialism – "Sybil", "Yeast", &c. &c. These books picture a state of society which no longer exists, though there is sufficient similarity of names & claims to make it seem a picture of what confronts us. The problem, which is really urgent, is to identify rightly which in our curiously complicated society is the "under–dog", & to distribute sympathy and protection intelligently!

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