The Henson Journals
Sat 2 November 1929
Volume 48, Pages 422 to 423
[422]
Saturday, November 2nd, 1929.
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DIOCESAN CONFERENCE
Mr and Mrs Townley left the Castle after breakfast. Ella and Collinson went with me to Durham, where I presided over the meeting of the Diocesan Conference. The Chapter House was fairly filled. I delivered my Presidential Address to an audience which was very attentive, but rather dismayed than sympathetic. Disestablishment is too repulsive and perilous to be embraced save under the pretence of necessity. Rawlinson introduced the Sunday question very well, but the discussion that followed was extremely feeble. Ferguson, the late Headmaster of Bede School, Sunderland, spoke well, but that garrulous creature Knight of Ryehope and the hare–brained Lomax of Ferryhill, wasted time & darkened Counsel. We carried both Rawlinson's resolutions unanimously, & also, by 95 to 41, a foolish motion by Knight. Sabbatarian sentiment, which goes along with anything but Sabbatarian practice is still dominant.
[423]
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I gave tea in my rooms to the following – Pattinson, Tallents, Myers, Hatton, Carr, Carter, Ferguson, Colonel & Mrs Beaden, Ella & me. Then we returned to Bishop Auckland. We found Peter Richardson at the Castle. He had brought a noble cut–glass tumbler embellished with a Crown, a Mitre, the legend 'For Church & King', and the initials 'J. C.' which can hardly stand for anything but 'John Cosin'. He had brought a birthday present for me – the sweet youth!
The Bishop of Hereford writes to me at some length. From his letter, I gather that he would gladly postpone, & even abandon, the promised Commission on Church and State.
"I cannot feel that the proposed enquiry into the relations between Church and State will mostly be beneficial". So far he is right, for the only solution of the problem is Disestablishment, and the Commission expresses a timorous but very natural reluctance to accept that solution rather than any genuine and reasonable belief that there is any other. I suspect that many of the Bishops are in agreement with Linton Smith.