The Henson Journals

[126]

Monday, October 27th, 1930.

Stephenson writes to tell me that Spencer Wade is "in great distress". "The doctor has told him that if he is to save his boy's life (the boy is tubercular – with swollen glands) he must move to moorland air." This is calamitous indeed, for he was making an impression at Gateshead Fell, & will be uncommonly difficult to replace. This difficulty almost prohibits the obvious expedient of an exchange. Certainly, the practical arguments for the celibacy of the clergy are very strong, and grow stronger as one's experience lengthens. Here is Spencer Wade driven from his work for the second time by the alleged physical need of his ailing child. I am asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to arrange an exchange of livings for his father! But I must not, and I will not, sanction the appointment of an evidently unfit clergyman to Gateshead Fell. Spencer Wade has been only two years in that parish, and has made a good beginning. He was only 2 years at S. Matthew's, Bolton, when the child's health drove him from that parish also.

[127]

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Rawlinson brought over the ex–Baptist, Dennis, to be confirmed in the Chapel. As he had no Godparents when he was baptized by his father, a Baptist minister, I used the revised confirmation service. After lunch they both returned to Durham. Charles and I walked round the Park. We fell in with three young pitmen, all unemployed, and had some speech with them.

I finished reading 'The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall by Edward Marjoribanks M.P.'. It is an extraordinarily interesting narrative, the more interesting to me since I can recall so many of the famous trials in which the great advocate pleaded. The ethics of advocacy are very perplexing, & the enormous resources of persuasion which Marshall Hall possessed, seem to have been as frankly drawn upon for the defence of the guilty as for that of the innocent. "He fixed the jury with an eye which compelled consideration, & demanded assent from every reasonable man, even the most sophisticated. And so he won his cases and his fame" – so Ld Birkenhead in a brief Introduction describes his method: but it is a method

which may well have bene more successful, than serviceable to Justice.

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