The Henson Journals

[92]

Thursday, September 22nd, 1927.

I was pleased to receive a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing warm approval of my "Times" letter.

"I thank you cordially for the letter in yesterday's Times which has today reached me in Scotland. You have said quite admirably just what 'needed to be said' in reply to the really unfair & inconclusive letter of Mr Aubrey for the Baptists."

Canon Robinson also writes from Winchester:

"Your letter in today's Times is splendid. I have read it through three times with keen enjoyment. You have said just what wanted saying, & it could not have been put better. It is trenchant, & at the same time perfectly courteous."

There were also by the morning some Protestant denunciations! I shall become again the best–hated man in England in that camp!

I received an affectionate letter from James, who prefers to be called by his other name, Leslie. He will soon be home now after his first essay in globe–trotting.

I spent the morning in preparing a speech in advocacy of the Appeal for £150,000 in aid of the Victoria Infirmary which the Ld. Mayor of Newcastle is launching. He called on me as the Grand Visitor to support him: and I could hardly refuse. So I attended, delivered my speech to a roomful of 'notables' in the Mansion House, and promised a contribution of £50.

[93]

"I set upon cleansing Augeas's stable: upon purging that huge work, Mr Fox's Acts & Monuments', from all the trash which that honest, injudicious writer has heaped together, and mingled with those venerable records, which are worthy to be had in everlasting remembrance."

John Wesley, 'Journal, Dec: 17th 1750

In the way I read Mr Glanvill's "Relations of Witchcraft". I wish the facts had had a more judicious relater, one who would not have given a fair pretence for denying the whole, by his awkward manner of accounting for some of the circumstances.

Ibid. Sept. 2nd 1751

I read over Pascal's "Thoughts". What could possibly induce such a creature as Voltaire to give such an author as this a good word: unless it was, that he once wrote a satire? And so his being a satirist might atone even for his being a Christian.

Ibid. Oct. 13th 1752

In my hours of walking I read Dr Calamy's "Abridgment of Mr Baxter's Life". What a scene is opened here! In spite of all the prejudices of education, I could not but see that the poor nonconformists had been used without either justice or mercy: & that many of the Protestant Bishops of King Charles had neither more religion nor humanity that the Popish Bishops of Queen Mary.

ibid. April 1st 1754

[94]

Of the clergy I had never seen so many together before, and between this and the following year I was able to form a true judgment of them. They are in general – I mean the lower order – divided into bucks and prigs: of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, & sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, & had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be endured, for they are but half–learned, are ignorant of the world, narrow–minded, pedantic, and overbearing. and now & then you meet with a rara avis who is accomplished and agreeable, a man of the world without licentiousness, of learning without pedantry, & pious without sanctimony; but this is a rara avis.

Alex Carlyle, Autobiography, p. 463.

This is a description of the English Clergy whom the excellent Scotch Moderator met at Harrogate in 1763. It is not attractive. There seems no kind of consciousness that the clergyman ought to be interested in religion, & apparently himself a religious man.