The Henson Journals

[75]

Thursday, June 7th, 1928.

I wrote to the aggrieved husband of the lady whom Hudson Barker refused to admit to Holy Communion last Easter. Then I finished the Choir sermon.

In the afternoon I went to Etherley, and committed to the grave the body of poor Merrefield. There was a considerable muster of clergy, and the parishioners almost filled the church. Parry Evans who delights in organizing 'functions' had arranged everything very decently. I fear that the widow will have little to live on.

The Archbishop of York writes with reference to the Sabbath breaking at Bishopthorpe (v. p. 70):–

"The statement is absurd. What happened I believe was that my Chaplain's son, a boy of 14 or so, who lives here, finding himself idle on the Sunday afternoon & noticing that part of the lawn needed mowing took out a small hand mower for a few minutes! That is the whole matter. How ridiculous is the credulity & suspicion of human nature!

I don't think the last sentence is fair. Outsiders could hardly discount the act by consideration of the actor without a knowledge they could not possess.

[76] [symbol]

[']The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale of the Establishment, – Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two outside the Establishment, & Puritanism produces men of national mark no more. With the same doctrine & discipline, men of national mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the same doctrine & discipline, men of national & even European mark are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France: but in Establishments. Only two religious disciplines seem exempted, or comparatively exempted, from the operation of the law which appears to forbid the rearing, outside of national churches, of men of the highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic & the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which though not indeed national are cosmopolitan.[']

Matthew Arnold. Preface to Culture & Anarchy. p. xvii

[77] [symbol]

How much truth is there in this claim that Establishment is the condition of genuine intellectual distinction? The answer turns on the definition of Establishment. If it involve the dissenter in an exclusion from the higher educational institutions, & close on him the door to all public careers, it would seem to be probable that he would become both illiterate or uncultured and narrow. And this was the situation of the English Dissenters in the whole period from the XVIIth century to the XIXth. Since the civil disabilities have been abolished, & they have had access to the Universities, could it be truthfully said that no men of national mark had been Dissenters? Then, perhaps, it might be argued that some of the most distinguished Anglicans (e. g. Bishop Butler) were bred in Dissent. I think it is true that the sectarian habit and atmosphere are unfavourable to largeness of sympathy and tolerance of temper: but they stimulate individuality and so far favour the development of ability. Moreover the triumph of Tractariansim, or, as it is now called, Anglo–Catholicism, within the Church of England has undoubtedly driven a wedge between the Church and the Nation. The Clergy are now largely severed from the main stream of English life.