The Henson Journals

[31]

Saturday, September 13th, 1930.

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Lionel Box writes to tell me that "our dear Norman passed over very suddenly in St Bart's Hospital on Sunday morning last". Norman was the youngest of three brothers who lived in Abingdon Street when I lived in Dean's Yard. They were good boys, whom I prepared for Confirmation, & of whom I thought very highly. The last time that I remember seeing Norman was when he was a boy scout about 15 years old. Now he is dead, & I still live. "Let me know mine end, & the number of my days that I may be certified how long I have to live."

The paper announces the death of old Canon Newbold of St Paul's Cathedral. He was 86 years old. I cannot forget that he wrote to me a very kindly expressed letter of congratulation on my appointment to Hereford, and then when the clamour against me organized by the E.C.U. broke out, wrote to me again withdrawing his congratulations! He was a Tractarian rather than an "Anglo–Catholick" and he had something of Keble's rigidity when "heresy" was in question. Judged by his standard of orthodoxy, I was in 1918, and am still in 1930, unquestionably & even grossly heretical. But so judged are there any but hereticks left in the Church of England?

[32]

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There is a sinister suggestion about the coincidence of 200 vacant parishes in the Highland where stipends are small, life hard and lonely, work arduous, and the self–presentation of 30 ministers for Biggar where the stipend is relatively large, the conditions of life unusually comfortable, and the work neither exacting nor extensive! Can we wonder at the gibes of the unbelievers?

Given a married clergy, is it reasonably possible to abolish this preferment hunting in the churches which is the shame & shadow of Protestantism? Poverty is so spiritually incapacitating by reason of the humiliating anxieties which it breeds that an unselfish and sincere man may honourably shrink from it even in the interest of his own ministry; but when he must consider what it means for wife & children, can it be either irrational or unworthy that he should avoid it if he honourably can do so? Yet these questions argue little faith and less zeal. They would hardly be advance by any man who really had accepted his ministry as indeed the Yoke of Christ.

[33]

I walked into Biggar, in order to get a little exercise. Ella walked back with me, having gone in before by motor with our hostess. The atmosphere was so heavy and even sultry, that ever so slight an exertion fatigued me excessively. Rain fell at intervals all the day through. I took occasion of passing the manse to leave my card on the Minister, Mr Rutherford, and with it a copy of my pamphlet "Church & State in England". It fitted on to our conversation of yesterday afternoon, & might serve to make the situation South of the Tweed more intelligible.

The 3 Presbyterian Churches in Biggar are all within a stone's throw of one another. It certainly seems an excessive ministerial provision for a town of 2000 inhabitants. How do the three ministers find enough to employ themselves all the week through? If they visited assiduously, they would be ever encountering one another, an experience which could hardly be other than embarrassing, and might even be spiritually disastrous. "Na, na: it's nae Releegion: it's just curstness"!

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