The Henson Journals

[166]

Tuesday, July 31st, 1928.

The final phase before going off for a "holiday" is horrible. To reduce into some kind of order the inextricable confusion of one's study, to pay every bill that presents itself, to anticipate the needs of the absentee month – here are problems which defy solution! In the end, everything arranges itself, & one never discovers the whole extent of one's failures.

George Nimmins came to lunch with his young lady, a very self–possessed person 6 months older than himself named Violet Smales. I have promised to marry them on September 12th in S. Oswald's, Durham.

Then Kenneth Hodgson came bringing £5., being the concluding payment of his C.C. scholarship for the first year. His first hear at Wadham has cost about £180. and his scholarship has provided £80.

The "Yorkshire Post" (faithfully reproduced in the local evening paper) has a notice of my "Reflections on the Crisis" in the Bishoprick. It is very badly printed, and contains one blunder so serious that I sent a note to the Editor asking him to correct it. Where I had written, "the principle of Christ's supremacy in human life", the Y.P. has "Christ's neutrality in human life"!!!

[167] [symbol]

"The most glorious Church in Christendom" – that is how Dean Church felt himself able to speak of the Church of England in 1877, when the country was excited over Ritualists, and the Church was sulking over the P. W. R. Act. Two days after writing the words, he was discussing with the Warden of Keble the question of his own resignation:–

"It is a question what individuals ought to do when, either in a Church or a nation, they seem to see a policy deliberately followed by those who happen to have power, which appears to them to be unjust, encroaching, and unconstitutional. If they have no special position they can grumble, protest, and wait, hoping for better things. But if they are in a place of honour & emolument, where yet they can do nothing, & where they are under the temptation of silence & compliance from private motives, submission & waiting are not so clear duties. If they cannot hinder mischief, they may at least resign."

The restraining considerations which he mentions were the interest of his family, and his desire "to do nothing to shake confidence in the English Church itself":

"I don't believe in disestablishment: I can see in it nothing but the present victory of mischief in the Church and in the nation."