The Henson Journals

[73]

Saturday, January 11th, 1930.

Charles Wesley's hymn "Jesu, Lover of my soul" seemed to some to be "too daring" a description of Jesus.

'Even John Wesley did not include it in the Large Hymnbook of 1780, evidently from fear that its opening sounded too familiar, whilst in a number of hymn–books 'Lover' was altered to 'Refuge' or 'Saviour', as being more dignified: as late as the nineteenth century Bishop Wordsworth thought it "inexpressibly shocking" that such a hymn shd be sung in Westminster Abbey by 'large congregations in a dissolute part of a populous & irreligious city.' This is ultra–sensitive, but it voices an instinctive and healthy dislike which is to be felt in both the O.T. and the N.T. So far as the latter is concerned, there is an evident care to avoid representations of the divine love for men as a general sentiment or as compassionate pity. God's love is related to the moral realities of human life, not to mere existence, & it is connected with the definite entrance of God into history & experience through Jesus Christ. The real pathos of life is not identified with mere suffering as such, much less with existence as a wheel of being on which men are bound, or as a transient scene where human life is nothing but "a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns" or "a murmur of gnats in the gloom".'

[v. Moffatt: Love in N.T. 21.]

[74]

There had been a fall of snow during the night: and during the day there were episodes of snow, so that the country assumed a wintry appearance. The dancing party dispersed after breakfast. I spent the most of the morning in reading Moffatt's "Love in the New Testament", which is certainly a careful and very suggestive study. He is, of course, a competent modern scholar, and he handles the documents as such. He hardly appreciates, perhaps, how grave is the religious effect of his criticism. It is not paraded, but emerges disconcertingly, & so to say, unintentionally. There is always the uncomfortable suggestion that, perhaps, after all, we do not possess the Lord's words, but only something which the apostolic church thought it fitting for Him to say. A writer in the Church Quarterly Review referring to some production of Prof. Bethune–Baker says 'and in all seriousness it must be asked how can he expect the average pagan man of the 20th century to surrender himself to a master about whom he has just been told that we have no trustworthy information whatever, and to stake his all on a grande part être". Moffatt is not as Bethune–Baker, but still –––––

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