The Henson Journals

[371]

Wednesday, February 23rd, 1927.

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I worked at the Article, but did little. After lunch I strolled about the garden, & then returned to the house, & fell to reading Batiffol's French History. His account of the S. Bartholomew massacre compares ill in point of thoroughness with Lord Acton's.

The Evangelical party in the Church of England has been described as "an army of illiterates generalled by octogenarians". The description is more unkind than untrue, or rather, it extends what is only true of a section to the party as a whole. It fastens on the salient features of that section of the Evangelical Party which is most insistent and clamourous in the opposition to the Composite Book. These men are the Bourbons of the religious life in England, who can neither learn nor forget. Their "spiritual home" in the modern world is not Wittenberg or Geneva or Zurich or Rome or Constantinople or Canterbury but Dainton in Tennessee. Fundamentalism is the same on both sides of the Atlantic, though its expressions are less crude in England than in the relatively uncivilized communities of America. The "hot gospellers" of the 16th century, the militant sectaries of the Commonwealth, the Protestant fanaticks who rioted under Lord George Gordon, the 'No Popery' crowds which hustled Parliament into passing the Ecclesiastical Titles Act have their latest representatives in the followers of Mr Kensit, and the audiences which gather to listen to the 'Protestant parsons' who are now carrying the 'fiery cross' through the country to the tune of 'Your Church and Nation in danger'.

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