The Henson Journals

[105]

Tuesday, June 26th, 1928.

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A dull day tending to become damp & blustering.

Hugh Cecil has an interesting and able letter in the Times, which is well–written, & obviously intended to tell the Bishops how they ought to handle the situation. We shall assuredly not go astray for lack of counsellors. Mainly the pressure is from the cautious folk, whom the mere suggestion of Disestablishment has hypnotized with terror. All the Tory politicians are for doing nothing: and even the Sectaries are calling us to pusillanimous counsels.

[Lionel and I walked around the Park during the afternoon.]

I received letters from the Bishops of Oxford and Manchester, both giving a cautious approval of my proposal that the Church Assembly should be invited to adopt a Declaration, affirming the Church's spiritual independence. The notion that the terms of Establishment could be revised so as to make impossible such overriding of the Church Assembly as the rejection of the Prayer Book Measure implies, evidently commends itself to many minds which recoil from the very suggestion of Disestablishment, but it is from a practical point of view altogether fatuous.