The Henson Journals

[220]

1st Sunday after Christmas, December 28th, 1930.

A calm bright morning after a stormy night. I celebrated the Holy Communion in the Chapel at 8 a.m. Ella was still on the sick list, & therefore unable to come. Charles was absent on holiday. So we numbered but 4 communicants. "Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of you".

The last Sunday in the year has a solemnity which is almost menacing. It closes another epoch of public witness, & shuts down the cover on another accumulation of opportunities, and efforts to use them. This Sunday is without engagements, & will be spent mostly in my study and alone. "Ubi episcopus, ibi ecclesia" [where the bishop is, there is the church]. How far does that theory carry us?

I wrote at some length to Brilioth, thanking him for his book.

After lunch I walked in the Park for an hour and a half. A squad of little vagabonds from "the Batts" were playing football in defiance of the godly Sabbatarian rule which prohibits Sunday games in the Park. I stopped their game feeling rather a humbug in doing so; & I comforted the "captain" with a shilling!

[221]

The volume of the Loeb Classics of Select Letters of St Augustine is prefaced by an admirable 'Introduction' presumably by the Translator Professor J. H. Baxter, the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in St Andrews. I read it through with much satisfaction. It brings out with rare clearness the interplay of economics and religion in the Donatist conflict.

"The enormous extension of landed properties in Africa laid upon the native population a heavy burden of serfdom which provoked acute social & racial hatred, & when, through the generosity of the emperors, the Church itself, in addition to being officially recognized, became a landed proprietor, that opposition which had begun as a simple question of ecclesiastical rivalry was soon augmented by the accession of discontented slaves who were prompted to rebellion by economic oppression and social grievances."

"The victorious church … became itself a proprietor & employer, bound to the same system of exploitation as had characterized the civil regime. The owners of large estates, who were Christians, compelled their dependents to accept the faith, on the principle cujus regio, ejus religio [whose realm, their religion]."

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