The Henson Journals

Mon 2 September 1929

Volume 48, Pages 297 to 299

[297]

Monday, September 2nd, 1929.

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Graham White telegraphs that he cannot accept St Paul's, W. Hartlepool. Probert writes to say that the Crown has nominated him to Marley Hill. He has no degree, and a fearful wife. He will be next–door neighbour to Petitjean who also has no degree. We have travelled far from the conception of the Establishment as ensuring "a scholar and a gentleman" in every parish. These humbly–born, illiterate, and socially limited clergy are extraordinarily ill–suited to the parochial system as it now exists. Even the houses which were constructed for the special purpose of suiting the clergy, as recently as 30 years ago, are now bitterly denounced as excessive. The system of the Wesleyans – a small furnished house maintained by the denomination & £6 per week – is what we need: &, of course, there must be an end of the life–tenure. Nothing short of Disestablishment, which would force us to recast the system, will match our case. The existing arrangements are becoming so far beyond our power to work them, that a break–down cannot be much longer postponed.

[298]

W. Harlow, the son of the Vicar of St. Paul's, Stockton, came to see me with reference to his father, who, while on holiday duty, has been incapacitated by a paralytic stroke. He brought a note from the doctor stating that prolonged abstinence from work was necessary. I said that I must take time to reflect on the situation, and would come over to St Paul's next Sunday morning, when I could see the Churchwardens. Harlow has only been 20 years in Orders, & yet he is probably hors de combat, and, if so, will certainly require a pension. This suggests an aspect of the pension–problem which is not often considered by those who urge the bishops to accept elderly men for Ordination.

Mrs Russell–Smith (née Dorothy Tait) arrived with her son, Roy, a Rugby boy of 14. Both of them are absurdly like Tom Tait, her brother & his uncle, whom I prepared for Confirmation in Westminster, & whose sudden death cast his father into such profound & protracted sorrow. They are taking a holiday together in the motor which she (nominally) drives.

[299]

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Any nation might be proud of the shrewd, brave, prosperous, & highly intelligent yeomen who flocked to the American camp: but they were very different men from those who defended the walls of Leyden, or immortalised the field of Bannockburn. Few of the great pages of history are less marked by the stamp of heroism than the American Revolution, and perhaps the most formidable of the difficulties which Washington had to encounter were in his own camp.

Lecky. History. iv. 229

In this aspect of moral inferiority, the American Revolution reproduced the most notable feature of the English Revolution of 1688. Curiously enough, both these morally squalid achievements have been so completely idealized that they have passed in the traditions of the English & American peoples as glorious events, to be boasted of without measure.