The Henson Journals

[42]

Thursday July 15th, 1926.

Fawkes writes: – Houtin (who is now Directeur of the Mus&eacutee P&eacutedagogique in Paris) is a friend of mine and perfectly honest: but I think his view of the sceptical priests is exaggerated. No doubt there are worse – in all churches: but I have only known one man of whom I thought, perhaps wrongly, that he was an unbeliever. Duchesne had on one side, a tongue like Voltaire's: on the other, the simple piety of a Breton fisherman. I never heard so obviously devout a mass as his. He was profoundly conscious, of course, of the follies of Catholicism: but he didn't think that the modernist movement, whose debacle he foresaw was any real way out of the difficulty: &, like the Hohenlohes & von Hügel, he could see no other church than the Catholic ….. The difficulty for a R. C. is that the silentium obsequium was condemned in Jansenism; & that Pius X formally excluded all evasions in subscription. But in freer churches the attitude is not, and has not been historically, unknown. This is why new creeds would be intolerable. Historical formulas may, and, indeed, must be taken historically: new ones cannot.

Fearne and I motored to Harperley, and had tea with Colonel & Mrs Stobart. Their garden is wonderful. He told me that during the General Strike all the rifles of the Territorials had to be sent away, in order that the risk of their being seized by the strikers might be obviated. This shows that the authorities realized the gravity of the situation.

Mrs Russell with her son & daughter came to dine & sleep. Mrs Toland and her daughter Mrs Bacon came on a visit. Brooke Westcott also came for a few days. Our dinner party numbered 11.

The temperature was more endurable: indeed, it was almost chilly: so that Mrs Stobart offered me a fire this afternoon. S. Swithhun's [sic] day passed over without rain, to the vast relief of the superstitious. I made scarcely any progress with the Hereford sermon: it seems that I have lost the art of sermon–making.

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