The Henson Journals

[75]

1st Sunday after Epiphany, January 12th, 1930.

"Grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, & may also have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same."

The duplications 'perceive and know' 'grace & power' may perhaps be connected. To perceive the way of one's duty and to know how to walk in it require the Divine assistance to conscience and to understanding. So cleanse our inward vision that it may see through the crowding sophistries of convenience & expediency, and perceive the straightforward pathway of duty. So to strengthen the will is and ill inform the understanding that duty may be chosen & understood.

I celebrated the Holy Communion at 8 a.m. in the Chapel. We were but five communicants in all, & of these Alexander had so bad a cough that my devotion or feeling of devotion – not to be wisely identified, though easily cheating us into assuming their identity – was grievously disturbed. This interplay of the physical and the emotional is most humiliating, baffling, and spiritually perilous. Sometimes I am greatly tempted to envy those pachydermatous souls which never feel anything., neither rising above nor falling below their squalid level.

[76]

[symbol]

I wrote to Bishop Lawrence, sending him a copy of "The Kingdom of God". He is certainly the most attractive American ecclesiastic of my acquaintance, and, perhaps, the most Anglicised. The Anglican model on which he has been formed is that well represented by the late Archbishop of Canterbury. It is Erastian in feeling, latitudinarian in belief: and not at all ascetick in habit. I think that it is now almost extinct, for the conditions of modern life are prohibitive. Democracy, as it is now understood, is unfavourable to tolerance, courtesy, scholarship, and, indeed, to all that is distinctive of the Christian gentleman.

Ella accompanied me to South Church where I preached to a very scanty congregation. There was a brisk snow–storm in progress, so that some allowance must be made for hostile weather: but even so, it was a pitiable representation of a parish which contains 16,000 souls. The Vicar himself read the prayers. He is a good man, and very industrious, but his sepulchral voice and cadaverous aspect might fright away all but the saintliest!

---