The Henson Journals

[366]

Saturday, October 5th, 1929.

Caröe sends his plans for the re–arrangement of the stables &c. It is both ingenious & pretentious: it will assuredly be also expensive. How far I shall be benefitted is not clear: & what proportion of the expense will fall on me is not stated. In any case, there is a prospect of having the workmen about the Castle most of the winter.

The Revd D. Cowling, Vicar of Eppleton, died suddenly yesterday. He had been there for 24 years, grumbling all the time, an unhappy man, rancid with discontent. He had the "cure" of nearly 7000 souls. The patron of the benefice is "the Crown", which means "Labour". This is Establishment indeed. If my counting be accurate, there are no fewer than 32 livings in the Gift either of the Crown, or of the Lord Chancellor: and most of the appointments have been very bad. It is doubtful whether any Church gets into its ministry so many men, of whom it seems inevitable to say, that they are not genuinely religious, & that their hearts are not really in their work.

[367]

Two youths – Ernest William Hunt, aged 20, and Joseph Aidan Handley Harlow – came to see me: & I approved them both as 'Diocesan Candidates'. They are both sons of clergymen, & being trained in 'Evangelical' colleges.

The Revd W.B. Blackett, assistant curate of Bishop Auckland, accepted nomination to the Vicarage of Byers Green. He has been 19 years in Orders, and (an important qualification for that parish) he has 'private means'.

I wrote to William, Ella, & also to Archdeacon Holland, in reply to a letter in which he had described the case of Leonard Wilson, who has got into trouble with his C.M.S. employers for a sermon he preached in Cairo. I gathered that he has vented some critical conclusions about the Scriptures which have stricken a panic into the Fundamentalists of the Society. I wrote yesterday to Wilson himself asking him to come here, & talk over his plans.

At nightfall the weather became wet and blustering.

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