The Henson Journals

[308]

15th Sunday after Trinity, September 8th, 1929.

A most beautiful morning. The stillness of the Sabbath rested on the land as the autumnal dew on the grass. Ella and I went to St Anne's, & there received the Holy Communion together. The celebrant was Pattinson. He is reverent, deliberate, & speaks with a clear, musical voice.

The Gospel was consolatory & congruous with my mood of extreme anxiety. If only we could live in obedience to the Master's Words, how great would be our strength & our happiness!

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, & his righteousness, & all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow; for the morrow will be anxious for the things of itself; sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

I motored to Stockton–on–Tees, and there preached at Mattins in S. Paul's Church. Vincent Harlow, the Vicar's son, read the prayers, & read them well. He is now principal of the Rhodes Institute in Oxford. It occurred to me that it might be well [309] to speak to him about Kenneth, & invoke his friendship for a youngster who needs nothing more. He promised to befriend him.

Vincent Harlow is an intelligent and level–headed man, who has seen much of the world, & knows Oxford well. He gives an ill account of the state of the University. A frivolous rather cynical tone prevails, and a habit of self–indulgence, which sometimes, perhaps not often, passes into actual vice. He puts this down many to the dominance of women students. He had seen the co–education system in Southampton, where, for five years, he was a lecturer. There it worked fairly well because the students were subject to discipline, but in Oxford the liberty was too large. In America the union of both sexes in the Universities was working badly, & some of the "State Universities" were simply "sinks of iniquity". There is much evidence which confirms his unfavourable account of Oxford, & I incline to think that this fact is an element in the untoward development of young Kenneth. The genius loci has been too much for him.

[310]

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I wrote to William, Leslie, & Gerald. Also, to the Bishop of Oxford, asking him to send me the pronouncement on Modernism of which some portions have appeared in the newspapers. Hitherto I have shrunk from saying anything on that issue, save that I made a kind of protest against ignoring the ecclesiastical tradition so completely as the modernists are accustomed to do. But events may compel me to be more explicit. Barnes does not appear to go beyond the limits of accepted freedom, & his words would not attract so much notice if he had not made himself offensive to the Anglo–Catholicks, & if he were not Bishop of Birmingham. Charles is far more heretical, and his reported statements about Christ's Resurrection cannot be easily reconciled with any accepted version of Christian belief. At any moment, I may be directly challenged so that some declaration of personal belief can hardly be avoided, & I am far indeed from feeling able to utter my real mind on the Credenda.

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