The Henson Journals

[133]

Wednesday, August 25th, 1926.

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Two subjects suggested themselves to my mind as suitable for treatment in the Evening Gazette – Royalties and Walsingham Abbey. The first, perhaps, would be the more relevant to the actual situation: the last would be the more prudent. A third subject came to my hand as I searched for the account of Erasmus's visit to "Our Lady of Walsingham" viz. A Puritan Humourist. Samuel Torshell, whose treatise "The Hypocrite Discovered & Cured" 1644 is full of good things.

After lunch I walked round the Park with Herbert Smith and incidentally talked to several young miners. They are sick to death of idleness.

["]William of Newburgh tells us that not a fourth part of the crusaders returned home – the rest died of want, exposure, or battle – & in this he sees a striking exhibition of the mercy of God, for those who came back relapsed into their evil ways, while those who died went to heaven, so that the crusades were a success in peopling the heavenly Jerusalem if they failed to secure the earthly one …..["]

["]In the 17th century Father Gobat says that those who perform many pilgrimages are rarely sanctified, for to most people they are merely a matter of carnal gratification, &, if we may judge from Binterim's defence of pilgrimages, objections to their demoralizing influence are urged against them at the present day ["]

(v. H. C. Lea, Auricular Confession &c., vol. ii. p. 129)

Pilgrimages, like Methodist "camp–meetings", create an atmosphere of semi–hysterical excitement & bring crowds together with results on [sic] sexual morality which are as shocking as they are, in the circumstances, inevitable.

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