The Henson Journals

[9]

Monday, August 20th 1928.

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Doyle once said to me – it was in my early days at All Souls, when I was very young, very positive, & doubtless very absurd, that I reminded him of Laud. This was not unkindly, for Doyle was in his ecclesiastical opinions something of a Tractarian, nor yet was it wholly favourable for he disliked the intolerance with which Laud's name is generally associated. In one respect I myself perceive a resemblance between the Martyred Archbishop & myself. We both keep diaries of a grotesquely egotistic kind. Diary keeping is like dram–drinking, a habit ill to form & hard to break! Lonely men are apt to become horribly interested in themselves. Their life is destitute of the principal corrective of egotism – a family, and it emphasizes every self–regarding element in experience. Laud was a baffling combination of apparent opposites. On the one hand, the persecutor of the Puritans: on the other hand, the patron of the first Latitudinarians, at once a protagonist against Romanism, & generally credited with a privy ambition for a cardinal's Hat, in himself a genuinely humble Christian, & to the general public the very embodiment of a hard & haughty prelatism; he bought the Church of England to ruin by his life, & secured its ultimate triumph by his death.

[10]

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The newspapers report the death of Lord Haldane at the age of 72. My personal acquaintance with him dates from the agitation which preceded the passing of the Enabling Act. His great intellectual attainments & limitless power of work went along with a childish vanity which often moved a smile. I thought him a remarkable example of that combination of strong intellect & weak understanding which is, perhaps, more often observed among lawyers than among the members of any other profession. His association with the Labour Party did not add to his reputation, and certainly immersed him in many humiliations. It was probably due to his vanity which led him to imagine that he could become the Leader & Guide of the new Democracy! His comparatively early death, for he comes of a long–lived stock, is attributable to 3 causes – habitual over–work, habitual over–eating & drinking, & habitual abstinence from exercise. Only a very strong constitution could have sustained for so long a manner of living which violated every rule of health. He was kind to young men, genuinely attached to the cause of the poor, as religious as his philosophy permitted, and not illiberal where his sympathies were engaged.

[11]

A persistently wet day from start to finish. Horrible! I finished my reading of Rashdall's books, "Ideas & Ideals" which is full of good stuff, most of which I had read when it originally appeared in some periodical or other. Unless my judgment is mistaken, it will have a large sale, & exercise a considerable influence.

Brayley [Braley] brought his friend Shepherd to have tea. He, the said friend, is a mighty talker, & dogmatized about India, where he has spent a few months, with an oracular confidence which only ignorance could explain, & not even ignorance could excuse. He was distinctly contemptuous of the C.M.S. missionaries, & deeply bitten with the plausible sophistries of Indian Nationalism.

Mr. David Ross, who aspires to be ordained, came to see me. He is the son of an agnostic stone–mason and a Congregationalist mother, & was himself brought up as a Unitarian! He had, however, turned away from this heresy, & taken a B.A. degree in London University with a view to being ordained. He is 26 3/4 old, and knows no Greek. I agreed to accept him as a candidate. He is to work as a layman in Stephenson's parish, and live in the Rectory at Gateshead until he is able to take office as an assistant–curate.

[12]

"The great defect of much religious teaching at the present day is that it treats as simple and obvious things that are by no means simple & obvious: while it turns into difficult and unintelligible mysteries things that are really very simple & intelligible. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as worked out by the Schoolmen, contains much with which even candidates for Holy Orders need not be troubled. But there is no reason why even peasants should not be taught that when the Church asserts that there is only one God, it really means what it says: & that the Trinity which it teaches is simply the Trinity of Power, Wisdom, & Love."

Rashdall. 'Ideas and Ideals' p. 179

I don't think this is as orthodox as it is attractive. Nor is it quite obvious how this Trinitarianism is to provide a key to 'the problem of Jesus'. Are we to say that the One God disclosed His Wisdom in Jesus, and His Love in the Holy Ghost? But the New Testament is quite clear in connecting the Divine Love with the Mission of the Son.

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