The Henson Journals

[17]

Monday, April 30th, 1928.

A dull wet day from start to finish.

I wasted the entire morning in preparing a speech for the Prisoners' Aid Society, and delivered it in Durham in the afternoon. The Sessions Hall contained quite a respectable company. Mr Alexander Patterson, who once wrote a book, ''Across the Bridges'', which attracted much attention, & who is now a Prisons Commissioner spoke first, & I followed.

Then I went to the College, & had tea with my Suffragan. Lionel drove me in his car, (Leng having gone to Birmingham to fetch home the Austin Car, which has been in Hospital there since Friday, the 13th April) to Collierley, where I confirmed 83 persons, mostly females, from the parishes of Collierley, Annfield Plain, & Dipton. The little church was crowded, & the atmosphere was stifling, but the candidates very attentive, & the congregation behaved with reverence. We returned to Auckland immediately after the service.

The publishers, Brentano Ltd. sent me a dreadful book. ''The Companionate Marriage'', by the same judge Ben B. Lindsey & Wainwright Evans who wrote the other book, hardly less appalling, ''The Revolt of Youth''. If the picture of America which these books give is just then, indeed, it is the novissima hora [newest season/latest manifestation] of civilisation.