The Henson Journals

[284]

Wednesday, December 15th, 1926.

There was a covering of snow on the ice–bound land when the morning shone brilliantly from a cloudless sky. I finished the charge, and then went in to Durham with my ladies and chaplains in order to listen to Mozart's "Requiem" in the Cathedral, after which I had tea with Canon & Mrs Cruickshank, and then returned to Auckland.

Gilbert writes to me from British Columbia – "Canadian newspapers state that the Archbishop of Canterbury is expected to retire early in the New Year, and your appointment as his successor is mentioned as quite likely". Thus a silly & senseless canard traverses the globe, and has no other effect than to set idle tongues talking, and to make the Bishop of Durham look ridiculous. It really is very provoking.

Lord Inchcape's recent outburst against the Christian Missionaries in China has evoked a series of protests in the correspondence columns of the Times. This morning's issue contains an admirable letter from Sir Theodore Morison. He has "little faith in the Bishop of Exeter's suggestion that the indigenous faiths should be respected & indirectly encouraged. If half the best books in English literature contain in them the seeds of revolutionary tendencies, the creeds of the East, weakened and discredited by science and modern thought, can make no stand against them. I speak on this subject with the authority of failure, for I persuaded the late Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to consent, reluctantly, to the teaching of Mohammedan divinity in Aligarh: it failed almost completely of achieving any result."

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