The Henson Journals

[182]

Tuesday, August 7th, 1928.

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A wet morning, but still very warm. I wrote a long letter to the Bishop of Wakefield, & then wrestled again with Dom Vonier. He uses a language which is scarcely intelligible, and labours points which seem to me unmeaning, though to him they are plainly crucial. I begin to discern the depth & width of the chasm which severs the modern world from the Catholick Church. The medieval jargon of sacramental doctrine is like the uncouth clamour of children, amphatic & without sense.

We motored to Branxton, and had tea with the Vicar and his wife. They had collected some neighbours to meet us – Lord & Lady Tankerville, Canon & Mrs Holland, & two or three ladies whose names I know not. Lord T. is a singer, & was good enough to sing some songs. He has the aspect of a retired musician, but his talk is better than his appearance. After tea we walked over the battlefield of Flodden. It is easy to re–create the episode, though the traditional number of men engaged must be grossly exaggerated. The space is too small for the movement of such large armies. We returned to Wooler, & had time to play croquet before dinner.

The process of surrounding Lang's head with an appropriate nimbus of legend has already set in. Today a story about his preference of a chaplain to a wife adorns the newspapers.

[183] [symbol]

"So we preach, and so ye believed.' (I. Corinthians XV. II.)

"Now the Lord is the Spirit: & where the Spirit of the lord is, there is liberty." (2. Corinthians. Iii. 17.)

Will these passages serve to indicate the subject of the sermon which I would like to preach to the Church Congress viz: the correlation of the traditional & the progressive in a genuinely Apostolic Church? The two factors inhere in Christianity which is both a religion rooted in historic fact, & a Religion of the Spirit. Backwards always to the 'the faith once delivered to the Saints,' 'the truth as it is in Jesus: and forwards always to the applications of the historic revelation to the ever–changing situations into which the Church will come as the centuries pass. – the problem which confronts the Church is, precisely, the harmonizing of the lessons of the past and the requirements of the present. In order to solve the problem which is presented afresh to every generation, the Church possesses 'the mind of Christ' as disclosed by 'the Spirit of Truth'. The tradition, embodied in its essentials in the New Testament, provides a criterion of new departures in ecclesiastical life. History, garnering & certifying the lessons of experience, is a 'running commentary' on the Tradition, validating some interpretations, disallowing others. At no point in the Church's career can the necessity of making ventures of faith be excluded.