The Henson Journals

[81]

1st Sunday after Epiphany, January 13th, 1929.

I celebrated the Holy Communion in the Chapel at 8 a.m. We numbered 8 communicants including John. The Collect for the day is exactly congruous with our present situation. It prays that we "may both perceive & know what things we ought to do, and also may have grace & power faithfully to fulfil the same." We are now doubly disadvantaged by a real perplexity as to our duty, and a conscious shrinking from any cause, however obviously right, which entails humiliation and loss. As a Church, and as individuals, we are so placed. Our private preferences and interests thrust themselves unbidden & unrecognised, into our public policies, and inject them an element which is alien and mischievous. When we speak of the Church, & when we plead her necessities, we may be really seeking our own gains. "The heart of man is deceitful & desperately wicked. Who can know it?"

[82]

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The notion of writing a personal Apologia, & making the "Charge" no more than the peg on which to hang it, persists and takes shape in my mind. I wrote to Geoffrey Dawson asking him whether he could arrange for me to have transcripts of the letters which I have written to the Times in the course of nearly 40 years. They would supplement my Journal and my published works, and thus provide a fairly complete & trustworthy record of the movements of my mind. The Articles in the Edinburgh Review must be added. I have no list of them, but copies of that Journal which I have include the following:–

Jany 1920	The Church and Socialism
Oct. 1926	Religion and Economics
April. 1927	The Composite Book
Oct. 1927	Quakerism.

None of these has any direct bearing on the problems of Establishment.

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