The Henson Journals

[364]

Friday, October 4th, 1929.

I had an interesting party at lunch. Dr Eustace Hill brought Sir Arthur Newsholme K.C.B. late Principal Medical Officer, and Dr McCullough joined us. We talked much on a variety of subjects.

After my guests had departed, Pattinson and I walked round the Park. We fell in with a youth of 19 who is a Cambridge undergraduate, John Lindley Wilkinson, and took him round the Park with us. I gave him a copy of "Continuity", and wrote his name in it.

The publishers sent me a strange book – "Vanamee by Mary Longer Vanamee (Mrs Parker Vanamee'. The note on the cover states that it is 'the story told by his wife, of a young American of extraordinary charm and vitality, who was killed in the war.' It casts a curious light on ministerial and ecclesiastical life in the United States. Vanamee was an episcopalian, & his training was received in the Union Seminary in New York.

[365]

"Reformation history has been so blighted and disfigured by invidious personalities that we are apt to exaggerate the influence of individuals on the issues at stake."

Mathieson. Politics & Religion in Scotland. Vol I p 56.

And yet the specific idiosyncrasies of the key–figures of the Reformation did affect the course of affairs so patently & so potently that it is very difficult to deny that 'invidious personalities' determined the broad results. Who can question the personal influence of Charles V, Luther, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Calvin, Elizabeth, John Knox, Loyota, Philip ii, William the Silent, Alva, and many others? Had these men been different, not only in their opinions, but in their mental & moral type, the course of European history could not have been what it was. I suspect that Mathieson inclines to the fatalistic or pseudo–scientific view of history, which is certainly no more than a Lay–truth, if so much as that.

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