The Henson Journals

[204]

Saturday, October 16th, 1926.

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Dr Jackson sends me the following illustration of the carelessness with which Confirmation was administered in the Diocese of Durham under my predecessors: –

"This morning an old standard of Chester–le–Street to whom I was showing the Beadle's Staff remarked 'That was the stick that Johnny Bell took down to "the Greens", and drove all the lads & lasses to church with, when the Bishop was coming: Johnny drove 'em all to the church whether they liked it or not, 700 of 'em to be confirmed'. There seems to have been no preparation of the candidates. The Beadle just gathered together all the children to meet the Bishop and be confirmed. This was the occasion on which the Bishop discarded his wig, & lost his dignity as Bishop of Durham: as recorded by the Churchwardens in their record book."

This indecent procedure was identical with that described by Baxter, as being followed in the diocese of Worcester, when he was himself confirmed by Bishop Thornborough. Care in the preparation of candidates is hardly older than the Tractarians. Of course, so long as children were systematically catechised in the parish churches, as the rubrick requires, no special preparation was really needed. But the great importance now attached to Confirmation is a very modern phenomenon. The Anglo–Catholics led astray by the Roman model, are destroying the value of Confirmation as an occasion for careful instruction in Christian faith and morals by making it a little child's affair.

[205]

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Fawkes went off about midday. He was ordained to the diaconate as long ago as 1874, so that he cannot be less than 75 years old. He is astonishingly alert in mind, & physically he seems to be more vigorous than he was. His appetite for reading is insatiable and indiscriminating. I made him read Hervey's Memoirs of the Court of George ii, and he was vastly entertained.

I spent the morning in completing my Sunderland sermon. After an hour's walk with Ernest in the Park, I had an interview with Mr Isaac Whitehouse, a lay–reader from Jarrow. He is an engineer nearly 26 years old, but has had his heart set on religious confirmation at [sic] the age of 16, and cherishes the hope that he may be ordained. On the whole I was well impressed, and spoke words of encouragement.

The Spectator has an article headed "The Durham Miners' Stand", which is signed "F. A. Mackenzie", and purports to be a first–hand account of the situation in this county. It contains rather a sensational description of the miners' children as being worse to look at than the children in Poplar or Canning Town. "That the strike is helping to spread Communism among the younger miners here can scarcely be denied." From internal evidence I judge that the article was written in Gateshead. That is confessedly the most squalid district in the whole county, but it is not really representive.

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