The Henson Journals

[80]

Monday, February 23rd, 1931.

"He seemed to be a Christian, but in a particular form of his own: he thought it was to be like a divine philosophy in the mind: but he was against all public worship, & everything that looked like a Church.["]

Burnet's character of Algernon Sydney. v. Hist: of O.T. ii. 351.

"I well remember the warmth with which the eminent Professor Josiah Royce explained to me that he held it a point of conscience, as a metaphysician, never to set foot in a church: yet Royce regarded himself as anything but an enemy to Christianity. An equally distinguished philosopher, well known in St Andrews, Professor Bosanquet, exhibited the same prejudice no less unambiguously …..

Strangely enough, Bosanquet seems to have fancied that in saying these things he was reproducing for a perverse generation the thought of S. Paul!"

A. E. Taylor. "The Faith of a Moralist"

vol. II. p.14

[81]

I revised & partly re–wrote the sermon that I preached at the Temple on February in order to fit it for use in Newcastle Cathedral on March 15th.

Jack Carr came to lunch, and afterwards walked with me in the Park. Dr McCullagh joined us. The weather was mild and springlike. Birds were singing bravely, not yet with the full throated confidence of spring, but with great power & sweetness.

Charles and I motored to Billingham, where I confirmed 79 persons in the beautiful but small parish church. The sexes were about evenly divided: the service was reverent: the candidates attentive. On the whole, I was well pleased.

Tymms, the Vicar, gives an ill account of the great chemical works in his parish. Men are being discharged every week: & some engaged on a five years contract are being paid two years stipend & then got rid of. What does this mean?

I had not on any previous visit noticed the Font, of which the base is Anglo–Saxon, & the fine carved cover, Elizabethan. The chancel is quite modern. The Church is absurdly small for so large a parish, for it cannot seat more than 300, and the parishioners are now said to number more than 10,000. But there are few more than 600 on the roll, & the Easter communicants hardly exceed half that number.

[82]

The annual conference of the South Eastern Area Council of the British Legion, held at Caxton Hall, Westminster, "dealt faithfully" with the Bishop of Durham for his rash suggestion that the Armistice Day celebrations might with advantage be brought to an end at an early date.

"Mr Gordon–Larking, on behalf of the Maidstone branch" moved a resolution, & supported it by some rather astonishing observations.

"I think we as ex–service men place Armistice Day the same as all Christian people place Good Friday.

I don't think that the Bishop of Durham has any more right to dictate to us about Armistice Day than we have to dictate to him about Good Friday." The conference then carried a resolution stating that it expressed "its strong disapproval of the action of the Bishop of Durham and others in advocating the abolition of Armistice Day &c."

After the Restoration it was not unusual for Royalist preachers to compare the Martyrdom of Charles I with the Crucifixion of our Saviour. We must not wonder, therefore, to see the same blasphemous parallel declared by Ex–Service–men between the Great War and the Passion.

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