The Henson Journals

[70]

Tuesday, January 17th, 1928.

The Archbishop of Wales has a long letter in the Times on the Prayer–book Crisis, throwing his weight into the scale of the House of Commons against the Archbishops & Bishops. This is an odd proceeding more congruous with the writer's known friendship for Lloyd George than with the fitness of things.

Dr Jackson, the Rector of Chester–le Street called to see me about various arrangements in his rural deanery.

Kenneth came to see me. He returns to Oxford this Friday.

I worked at the Cambridge Sermon, but not very fruitfully. The fact is I don't really quite know what I want to say: and that circumstance so embarrasses my composition that I make no progress. Meanwhile, the evidences multiply that the general mind of the Church is opposed to any course of action that might even seem to jeopardise the Establishment. If the Revised Prayer Book had gained Parliamentary enactment, I should have been generally applauded: as things are, there is a growing tendency to regard me as 'the villain of the piece.'

[71]

When the Act of Union with Scotland (A.D. 1707) brought 45 Presbyterians into the House of Commons, which was then a purely Anglican assembly, there were not lacking those who pointed out the bearing of the change on the Church of England. Burnett, an ardent advocate of the Union, records that "it was said, here was a real danger the church ran into, when so many votes of persons tied to presbytery were admitted to a share in the legislature". This very reasonable objection was met by an appeal to the prevailing fear f Rome. "To all this,' writes Burnett, 'it was answered that the chief dangers the church was in were from France & from popery: so that whatsoever secure us from these, delivered us from our justest fears.' With Lewis XIV on the French throne, and the "Old Pretender" threatening an invasion the political danger was real & apparent: and its inseparable association with the Roman Catholic religion was not less so. It is curious that in 1927 the leader in the opposition to the Revised Prayer Book should have been a Presbyterian, and that the prevailing reason for the rejection of the Book should still have been the dread of Rome. The religious panic has survived the political danger which generated it.