The Henson Journals

[172]

Friday, August 3rd, 1928.

I tried to draft questions for my Visitation, which should cover the ground of parochial ministration. It is not an easy matter. The following subjects suggest themselves as suitable:–

1. Parochial Visitation

2. Treatment of Candidates for Confirmation

3. Religious Education in Day and in Sunday Schools

4. Preaching a) How far "special" b) How far done by laymen

5. Provision for teaching, help, & recreation

6. Unemployment, its effect on parochial religion

7. Co–operation with non–conformists, how far practicable or edifying

We motored to Kelso, and views the remains of the Abbey. They consist of little more than the tower. It must have been a fine building with the unusual arrangement of two towers, the one at the East and the other at the West. A plan of the fabric was discovered at Rome in 1922. The Duke of Roxburgh has his burying place within the ruins: and Ella found also the grave of some Dennistouns. We played croquet in the afternoon, and bridge in the evening. Voila tout!

[173] [symbol]

We are moving quickly outside the sphere of conventional rhetoric. Elegant pictures of idealized national life in which the parish church in which a cultured saint leads a worshipping community in the way of spiritual duty forms the central feature will no longer arrest attention & move enthusiasm. We have got beyond all that. We know too well that such pictures have no sufficient correspondence with the facts, as the facts force themselves on our notice, to be anywise serviceable. Even if we are able so far to free ourselves from prejudice and habit as to gather into our conception of the parish church 'all who profess & call Themselves Christians', we know that even that church is but a petty & powerless ^feeble^ factor in the general life. We know, moreover, that whatever may be the essential truth of its moral & spiritual oneness, in actual experience this idealized church, 'the Body of Christ', 'the pillar & ground of the truth', is so sharply divided on almost all the questions which interest civilized mankind that its effect in moulding the decisions of the State is almost nothing, & its witness to fundamental principles of faith & duty is fatally ^disastrously^ compromised. By general agreement, as significant as it is, for the considering Christian, humiliating. Christianity is placed in the category of private notions which a man may cherish but must not seriously act on.