The Henson Journals

[41]

Friday, August 26th, 1927. The Priory, Woodchester.

An ordination candidate, Wright, asks me to provide him with a title to be ordained at Advent. The answering of that question grows ever more difficult as the older priests disappear, and the Anglo–Catholick movement advances. The importance of placing the newly–ordained clergyman under the direction of a really competent senior is obvious. In my diocese the parish clergy who are competent for the task are very few, and some of them are placed in parishes which, for one reason or another, are plainly unsuitable. Then there are hardly any staffs of clergy left, so that the influence of assistant curates on one another – often the most potent & valuable of all forms of influence – has now generally disappeared: and assistant clergy themselves are but too often elderly men, weighed down by matrimony, ill health, and narrow training. I can find no more than 30 out of nearly 300 incumbents who could, even by a tolerant estimate of qualifications, be considered fit for the supervision of assistant curates: and these are not all suitably circumstanced.

[42]

Ella went to Cheltenham to see her cousin. I wrote and read in my room, & then joined my host in the garden until lunch–time. After lunch we were motored to a church a few miles from the house, where were some carved benches & pretentious 17th century tombs. The church itself had been mostly rebuilt in the reign of Queen Anne, and was barren of interest as that fact suggests, but it commanded a noble prospect, which went far to compensate for its lack of architectural distinction.

The newspapers are filled with accounts of two terrible rail disasters, the one near Sevenoaks in Kent, the other in Switzerland, both attended with considerable loss of life.

The Lord Mayor writes to remind me that I had promised to attend and address a meeting in Newcastle, which he would convene in September, in order to launch a great appeal for £150,000. for the Royal Victoria Infirmary. What chance of success has an appeal for a similar amount to save Durham Cathedral from slipping into the river? The whole outlook is as black as can be.