The Henson Journals

[255]

25th Sunday after Trinity, November 21st, 1926.

I celebrated the Holy Communion in the Chapel at 8 a.m. We numbered only six communicants in all. The "Observer" includes in "Sayings of the Week" a sentence from Gamble's mischievous speech in the Church Assembly last Thursday: –

"Sunday is not the Sabbath and is not in any way governed by the Fourth Commandment".

Surely the Christian Church came far nearer the truth when it spoke of the Lord's Day as "the Christian Sabbath", for that is precisely its historical character. The exact proportion of consecrated time – one day in seven – was plainly derived from Israel: the notion of perpetually commemorating by a weekly celebration the constituting Deliverance, the Exodus from Egypt in one case, the Victory over Death by Christ's Resurrection in the other, is as plainly Jewish: the Dominical doctrine that "the Sabbath was made for man, & not man for the Sabbath, therefore, the son of man was lord even of the Sabbath", justified the institution & determined the treatment of the Christian Day as well as that of the Jewish. The prophetic emphasis on the duty of Sabbath observance could not be without a bearing on Christian conceptions of duty. "Sabbatarianism" is a bogy which owes quite as much to a bigoted tradition as to its own intrinsic unreason: & it is noteworthy that even the great revulsion of the Restoration could not carry back the English people to the Laudian laxity in Sunday observance. Can any considering student of these times imagine that there is any real need to preach the duty of secularizing the Lord's Day?

[256]

Lionel went with me to Middleton St George, where I dedicated new vestries at the parish church, and preached the sermon at Evensong. We arrived at 4.30 p.m., and had tea with a number of leading parishioners, whose names I have failed to remember. They were dull, silent men, who looked bored, but were probably gratified by the compliment of meeting the Bishop! There was a large congregation in the church, which is not a large one. Some things pleased me, and did something to re–assure me under a certain suspicion which the fussy & rather canting manner of the incumbent had created. Thus, there were goodly companies of Boy–Scouts & Girl–Guides at the entrance. The congregation included a fair proportion of men, young & old. The behaviour of the choir in vestry and in Church was reverent, & the singing creditable. It is only fair to the rather unattractive–looking Rector to give full value to all these symptoms of pastoral efficiency. Per contra, there was a frightful list of announcements given out after the sermon, & an unpardonable reference to my discourse as a "magnificent appeal"! I noticed also that the little man, who in his previous parish passed as a very strong Protestant, is now evidently beginning to travel upwards! He has clothed the choir–boys in red cassocks, and decks himself with a very elaborate coloured stole! But the "north end" is apparently still used, though the two candles on the altar seem to have been lighted. All this is amusing, but not therefore without significance. Protestantism in the Church of England is all but dead. There is a dwindling company of octogenarians who write to the Record, & issue declarations about Prayer–Book Revision, & of course the "hot Gospellers" who follow the junior Kensit have a following of illiterate fanaticks. But these are mostly Dissenters.

---