The Henson Journals

[344]

Saturday, January 29th, 1927.

The great tempest continued through the night with diminishing violence, and subsided during the afternoon of the following day into a dead calm. There is much loss of life and property reported from various parts of the country.

I worked at the Lecture all the morning, and, in the afternoon, walked round the Park with Lionel. Then I tried to adapt a sermon to a Freemasons' Church Parade!

A letter from Canon Cosgrave indicates a disposition in the clergy to resent my censure on them for their failure to testify against breach of contract and peaceful picketing. He sends me a transcript of one of his sermons to show that he himself has his withers unwrung. But, then, his congregation is mainly composed of middle–class folk, who would welcome censures on the strikers! It is in the industrial parishes, where the evils actually prevailed, that the moral protest was needed, and there the clergy were "non–committal" or favouring. The Bishop of Birmingham told me that all the younger incumbents in his diocese were on the side of "Labour": and I suspect that as much might be said of most dioceses. They do not know, and cannot think; but they feel and speak strongly. In the British Revolution of 19–, as in the French Revolution of 1789, the inferior clergy will play a not inconspicuous rôle, becoming again the architects of their own ruin.

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