The Henson Journals

[87]

Friday, May 13th, 1927.

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While we were collecting for breakfast, a messenger from Durham brought the tiding of Cruickshank's death. He was just over 65 years old. I made his acquaintance in connexion with the Layman's League, which I founded in Oxford in 1885, and I kept in occasional touch with him until, when I came as Dean to Durham at the beginning of 1913, we were brought into close and continuous intercourse. He was an odd, impulsive, very sincere person, with a sensitive conscience, a warm heart, and a quick temper, very loveable and very impracticable & was sometimes absurd. He was a fine scholar, and had "the ball at his feet" when he took his degree: but he could neither keep discipline nor take a just measure of relative importance. Hence he was practically futile, and, being both highly–strung and lacking in humour, apt to shrink into himself, and fret over rebuffs which a differently constituted man would have discounted and dismissed with a jest. Religiously he had traversed the familiar road which leads out of Anglo–Catholicism to Modernism; but his heart ever yearned for the consolations of Sacramental Christianity. I judge him to have been a humble and genuine believer.

Partly his delicacy of health and partly, I surmise, the circumstances of his early upbringing made him very dependent on women; & this circumstance also reacted on his character not, perhaps, wholly to its advantage.

[88] [symbol]

Ella and I attended the meeting of the Prevention and Rescue Association of which Mrs Cruickshank is the Head of the Council. I prefaced the meeting with a few words of regret and condolence. Then we lunched with the Bishop of Jarrow, and returned to Auckland. Kenneth Hodgson came to see me. He looks supremely happy and healthy.

Bishop Knox sent me his latest fulmination, a booklet entitled. 'Will the Deposited Book Restore Order in the Church? Some startling facts'. I wrote to him at some length in reply, and sent him a copy of "The Bishoprick". Neither the letter nor the enclosures will phase the old man. In becoming the demi–god of the Protestant Underworld, he has made it difficult for him to change his course, and impossible for him to acknowledge his errors.

The Bishop of Manchester, or rather his publisher, sends me his latest volume, "Essays in Christian politics and kindred subjects". In the Preface he alludes to an article of mine in the Bishoprick, & says he was delighted "to find how close was our agreement."

Mr Nigel E Cornwall, who has offered himself for Ordination with a title to S. Columba's, writes to me very nicely in acknowledgement of my letter welcoming him to the diocese. He expresses himself with a frankness and modesty which allow me to form a good estimate of his quality.

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