The Henson Journals

[158]

Saturday, September 11th, 1926.

Lady Limerick gave us a vivacious account of her early life in Ireland, where her father J. Burke Irwin was a Resident Magistrate in the days of the Land League. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but could not endure the mental and moral squalour of that Church, and is now an ardent anti–Roman Anglican, though closely linked by family ties with the Papists. The society which she describes must have been remarkably vivid, brilliant, and cultured, but extraordinarily self–interested and reckless. Her picture of the Roman Church in Ireland is a repulsive one, & must be to some extent discounted as marked by the inevitable prejudice of a continuing personal resentment; but its essential character is, I think, certainly just.

George Dennistoun and his wife went off in their car after breakfast; a vast expenditure of time in valedictory photographing preceeded their departure! Then Mr Nairne Clark departed to his remote parish of Hunstanworth: and I was at length able to get to my study. But my table being in extreme disorder, I expended the remainder of the morning in trying to bring it into some decency of aspect & convenience of arrangement.

In the afternoon I went into the Park, and watched a Football match between St Anne's F. C. and Ferryhill F. C. The latter was the heavier team, & a considerable number of supporters heartened them with cries of encouragement. Both teams were mainly composed of unemployed miners: the vigour of their play demonstrated the sufficiency of their food supplies. Unless Durham County is altogether different from the other minefields, there certainly is no privation among the strikers. I talked with some young miners. They all professed a great longing to return to work, and a readiness to emigrate to the colonies if suitable employment could be found for them there. It is evident, however, that the notion of leaving the old country is repulsive to them.

Mary Radford with her husband and my Godson John arrived on a short visit.

[159]

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["]Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place. We may ask ourselves whether the scientific mentality of the modern world in the immediate past is not some successful example of such provincial limitation.["]

v. A. N. Whitehead, "Science and the Modern World". Preface. ix.

I received a letter which was unsigned, but which from internal evidence I judge to come from Mr Albert Mitchel, one of the Evangelical leaders in the Church Assembly. It asks me (1) whether in my judgment the action of the Eccles. Comn in permitting Sunday games on ecclesiastical properties can wisely be raised in the forthcoming session of the Church Assembly: and (2) whether, if so, I will myself introduce a resolution. I amused myself by drafting a possible motion: –

In view of the ill consequences to Church and Nation which must follow the Secularisation of the Lord's Day, the Church Assembly regrets the decision of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to permit Sunday Games on the lands under their control, and thereby to strengthen the secularizing tendencies already too powerful in English Society.

This seems a fairly defensible resolution, for hardly any one can deny that, whatever incidental advantages may accrue from it to individuals & even to sections of society, there are ill consquences which must follow from substituting for the Day of Rest a "Bank Holiday" in every week: & surely none can doubt that the action of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners has encouraged all who desire a total secularisation of the Lord's Day.

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