The Henson Journals

[357]

Wednesday, February 9th, 1927.

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Wycliffe was scornful of all the little devices by which the preachers of his time sought to arrest & hold the attention of their congregations, & appear to have been much the same as those which are fashionable now. "Wyclif in preaching could not descend from the professorial chair." Workman's chapter on "The Poor Preachers" (v. John Wyclif ii, 201–220) is very informing.

I paid the Household Accounts & some others, and then read John Wycliff. After lunch I walked round the Park with Ernest, and then had some talk with Cruickshank, who came to tea. I showed him the M.S. of my Earl Grey Lecture, and he thought it would serve well enough.

The papers publish some opinions of clergymen on the Revision proposals, all favourable, but then all from those who could hardly express other than favourable judgments on the work of their ecclesiastical superiors, most of them being suffragan bishops. The E. C. U. announces a special Conference next week in order to discuss the proposals. Meanwhile the cunningest and least scrupulous lawyers & and ecclesiastics in the country – for such I judge to be no unfair description of the lawyers and ecclesiastics who govern the policy of that baleful society – will direct their wits to the problem how to pose as loyal members of the Church of England while repudiating her authority. That they can honestly accept the new Book is, I think, inconceivable: that they will succeed in presenting themselves in the pathetic character of persecuted innocents I hold to be probable, all but certain!

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