The Henson Journals

[187]

Friday, July 15th, 1927.

"To Bishop Lightfoot the concrete was everything: to him (Westcott) nothing. 'A fact is to me, I must confess, of no interest at all, except in so far as it stands for some principle behind it'. That was why we suited each other. I supplied him with the ideas, and he supplied me with the facts. And if his facts didn't fit my ideas, I thought there was something wrong with them."

(per. Bishop Boutflower)

"Another common habit with that class of people is to talk as if the Sermon on the Mount were the essence of Christianity. It is no more Christianity in itself than John's Baptism was what many Dissenters think it – the same as Christian Baptism. No, the Sermon on the Mount is not Christianity: it is not a gospel but a law – the most perfect moral law no doubt – but there is nothing to lift a man outside himself, to teach him that he is dependent, or that the work has been done for him."

"I think I can say that I have learnt most from those whom I believed to be fundamentally wrong."

[188] [symbol]

Westcott's Dicta.

"I hold most strongly that all Christian truth is summed up in the two Sacraments. They are complete revelations: they are [sic] in a far deeper sense than the ordinary High Churchman means." (Bp. Westcott in private)

"I should like to know whether my idea is true that the great epochs of church building have always been the times of greatest spiritual depression".

"It was certainly the most thrilling moment I ever remember, when in __________ Cathedral I was present at the Mass. I could see the Host as it was elevated on the fingers of the priest: and at that moment there was a crash right through the building. It was the rattle of the soldiery presenting arms. It was indescribably shocking in its effect on me: I felt at that moment, you may say what you please, but here is idolatry naked and awful."

"The Church of Rome seems to succeed by canonising the world".

[189]

Westcott's Dicta.

He objects to any representation of the Passion which, he has often implied, he thinks alien to the instincts of early Christianity & unknown to Christian art for the first seven centuries: even the window in our Auckland Chapel "rather troubles him".

I asked the Bishop what he thought of the practice of formal Meditation under heads. "It seems so like thinking by machinery; still it is useful to have frames to put your thoughts into".

At table, discussing the subject of raffles, the Bishop said that he objected to them as part of the gambling question, & also on wider grounds. He objected to all the side means which were sometimes combined with sales of work for 'getting money out of people'. Such money, he thought, as distinct from that which is given, was not wanted nor acceptable.

"As you know, I am not fond of St Cuthbert," says the Bishop (after writing by request a collect for St Cuthbert & handing it to me to criticise) "but I suppose he had sympathy. Bishop Lightfoot says he had: & what Bede says amounts to it. But a man has no right to shut himself up in a turf hut. He doesn't attract me in the least".

[190]

Westcott's Dicta.

"The greatest thing in modern fiction is Romola – and that scene on the steps is the greatest thing in it".

"Carlyle said – didn't he? – that fiction did no good: and so he wrote that great work of fiction about the French Revolution. It's splendid: but it's only an interpretation of the facts, after all".

A Cambridge scholar at table remarked that he didn't believe in the past tense translation of the Greek Aorist. The Bishop asserted that he had always considered "that the whole of Christianity hangs on the Greek Aorist & the preposition".

The Bishop having criticised the Hymn "Jesus is God", I quoted the Quicunque in support. But, said the Bishop, that was just where the Quicunque was so perilous. It was justifiable if you were allowed to explain, but it endeavoured to apply logical deduction to subjects that [190] don't admit of logic. The Greek was all right: [sic] describes Nature, but "God", as in this Hymn, suggests whole Person. [sic] he could heartily say: but the Latin "Dei Genetrisc" sounded almost blasphemous, didn't it?

"Oxford killed her two poets of this century – Matthew Arnold and Newman – and turned them both into second–rate theologians".

[191]

Westcott's Dicta.

The Bishop would say that he never could hear "Lead kindly light" without thinking what Newman might have done, if he had not mistaken his calling.

"We never, never shall understand Russia till people will realize that Russia I now in the 13th century. We will not remember that nations which are contemporary chronologically are not so morally. But it is very hard to apply: and still harder when you remember that the same is true of different classes in the same nation, as well as of different nations".

"The further I get from youth, the more I appreciate it: Wisdom, I see, does not compensate for the loss of Enthusiasm".

The Bishop has just reprimanded in the gravest (& somewhat displeased) manner the five candidates for Priests' Orders who have come (as usual) without their Greek Testament. He said it seemed to him "incredible that you should come to these Ember Days without it: even going away for an evening you should have it".

[From "Some Sayings of Bishop Westcott by the Ven: Archdeacon Boutflower in "The Contemporary Review". Dec: 1903.]

[192]

The Vicar sent me a handsomely bound album with photographs of the service at Escombe on June 1st. A numerous company came to play lawn–tennis, & drink tea. I showed two parties over the chapel.

Brooke and Fosca stayed to dinner. They are ridiculously young for their new position of Rector & Rector's wife in an important and well–endowed Northamptonshire parish. In spite of "Life & Liberty" the ecclesiastical system is still far removed from anything that could reasonably be described as 'democratic'.

"Bolshevism is in many respects to be regarded as the political embodiment of the old Russian hope of the advent of the millennium, of the "man–god". All the laboriously thought–out doctrines of scientific materialism, of dialectic & pseudo–Marxist ideology are, in the last resort, merely an attempt to conceal the religious & sectarian foundation of the Bolshevik doctrine of salvation, & to clothe it in modern garments. The whole apparatus of scholarship, as it has developed about Bolshevism, is merely subsidiary and accessory, & cannot hide the fact that Lenin's teaching is fundamentally the old Russian gospel and that its adherents are sectarians".

Fulop–Miller 'The Mind & Face of Bolshevism' p. 88.

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