The Henson Journals

[165]

Friday, March 15th, 1929.

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Overclouded all day, and colder.

I wrote a very short and hostile notice of Major's booklet, "Modern Problems of the Church" as an introduction to the sermon on "The Apostolick character of the Visible Church", which I preached in Holy Trinity, Darlington, last December.

Two reporters from Durham came to "pick & choose" out of the MS. of my Presidential Address. I was at the pains of preparing a résumé of the poor thing for the Times.

William told me that when cutting the ivy on the entrance gate, he disturbed a large white owl.

Then the little tailor–man came to "try on" the clothes. He told me that he was keenly interested in birds, and, above all things, in spiders! He was in the War, presumably as a Bantam, and for most of it he served in France and Egypt. His experience is no doubt representative. To the lower middle and working classes the War broke the barriers of insularity, & threw open the door of the world. For most of the artisans, & many of the middle–class men, the experience brought little permanent advantage because the low level of intelligence & the low standard of culture, not to say also the untoward conditions under which they lived in the army, prohibited any genuine appropriation of experience. But for the superior minority?

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