The Henson Journals

[161]

2nd Sunday in Lent, March 16th, 1930.

A local Doctor, Weekes, came, & prescribed: and, of course, I had to stay in bed. The Bishop undertook to read my sermon for me. I was sufficiently recovered to beguile the tiresome day by reading the remarkable book "England" by a German scholar, Wilhelm Dibelius, which is warmly recommended in a Preface by the Master of Balliol.

Mine host visited me from time to time, and we talked much. His conversation deals much with football, in which he was himself formerly eminent, & on which he depends much (i.e. on his athletic reputation) as a means for attracting Ordination candidates to his diocese. Here, indeed, I could but listen, and marvel. "God fulfils Himself in many ways": although the Psalmist held that "The Lord regarded no man's legs", it may be the case that He makes an exception to His general rule in the case of a population, so absorbed in Football, as the Northumbrian. The Bishop grows, perhaps, rather tiresome in his incessant stories of the 'magnalia Dei' which he witnessed in Durham under Bishops Lightfoot & Westcott: of these stories the incandescent memory of a cheerful soul rather than the facts is probably the main foundation.

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