Durham Miners Gala

Traditionally held on the third Saturday in July. The coal miners who flocked to the gala (pronounced Gayla) went to demonstrate their unity and claim their rights to a fair pay and safe working conditions. These men had little sympathy for those with right wing views and this was demonstrated by an amusing incident which occured at the gala in 1925. In that year unemployment was particularly high in the County Durham coalfield at a time when a certain HENSLEY HENSON was Bishop of Durham.

Henson had become Bishop in 1920 during a miner’s strike and strongly criticized the use of strike action which he argued should become obsolete. This won Henson few friends among the miners and at the gala of 1925 when a group of miners thought they spotted the Bishop, he was lifted from his feet and escorted to the river where it is said they attempted to throw him in. Fortunately the man fell into a boat, losing his hat and umbrella in the process. Lucky for him, because it turned out that this was not the Bishop at all but the DEAN OF DURHAM, Dr J Weldon, who was at the gala to give a speech about the evils of drink !

The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, commissioned a portrait of himself to commemorate his ascension to that high office in 1928. When the Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, was visiting him the Archbishop naturally showed the new painting and asked his opinion. Unwilling to commit himself, Henson asked the Archbishop for his own views.

I fear it portrays me as proud, arrogant, and worldly, said he.

To which Henson replied:

And to which of these attributes does your Grace take exception?

Evangelicals have been identified as the growth industry of British Christianity. As one broadsheet put it a few years ago, The future belongs to the evangelicals! Our greatest danger is to get carried away with our own publicity! Evangelicalism in Britain - like everyone else is also on a precarious journey as we head off into the 21st century.

The biggest question for many of us is this: What is an evangelical? As the playwright Dennis Potter once said, The trouble with words is that you never know where they've been. The trouble with evangelical is that many people don't know where it's going. Many years ago Hensley Henson a former bishop of Durham described evangelicals as an army of illiterates, generalled by octogenarians, inclined to the view that they are excused culture, scholarship and intellectual exercise on religious grounds.

In post-war Oxford Lewis did not cut much ice. The enormous influence of the broadcast talks and The Screwtape Letters told against him. If he could be understood by Leading Aircraftsmen and ordinary citizens doing their firewatching roster, he could not be profound enough to engage the attention of people clever enough to be at Oxford. Also there had been a sea change in the climate of opinion, and Logical Positivism had swept all before it. Lewis was speaking out of an earlier system of thought, represented by William Temple, and was addressing an audience in a North East whose thought was formed by Dorothy Emmett, Leslie Hunter, Oliver Tomkins, Billy Greer and, earlier, Alan Richardson in the diocese of Newcastle, and here in Durham by Oliver Quick and Michael Ramsey, Bishop Henson and Bishop Williams, and lightened by the verse and epigrams of Dean Alington. In that setting his arguments went home. A wide variety of allusions evoked a whole range of considerations, the point often being driven home with a telling phrase or epigram. Lewis was reminding his audience of what they already knew, and drawing out the implications of propositions they already accepted. In Oxford it was different. Every assumption was up for questioning, and the Christian Platonism of an earlier age was rejected as meaningless, since it it could not be verified by sense- experience. The new generation of philosophers had a short way with traditional philosophy: ``I don't understand what you mean'' was the favoured weapon of attack, and once ignorance is seen as a boast rather than a confession, it is in the nature of the case invincible. In this atmosphere Lewis's arguments failed to grip. After a bruising encounter with Miss Anscombe in February, 1948, he made no further appearance on the philosophic scene, and though the Socratic Club, of which he remained President, continued to have considerable influence among undergraduates anxious to discover how they ought to lead their lives, neither Lewis personally nor his writings attracted any notice among professional philosophers.

Preached on the fifth Sunday in Lent 2001 at S. John the Baptist, Sevenoaks.

I judge him to have been the most considerable English Churchman of his time, not the most learned, nor the most eloquent, but so learned, so eloquent, so versatile, and so energetic that he touched the life of his generation at more points, and more effectively, than any of his contemporaries. So wrote Charles Gore’s most implacable opponent, Bishop Hensley Henson of Durham, when Gore died in 1932. Henson considered Gore to be a threat to all that he valued about the Church of England, because Gore was Catholic where he was liberal, radical in politics where he was conservative, and opposed to the establishment of the Church where he was convicted of its essentially national and protestant character. How did such a man become a Bishop in the Church of England, and why is it fitting that we should conclude our series on the heroes of the Catholic Revival by thinking about his outstanding contribution?

Gore was like Pusey an aristocrat, and his education and upbringing followed the conventional classical mould of the time, at which he excelled. By the time he was twenty one he was a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and preparing for ordination, committed to combining the pastoral with the academic life, and committed also to celibacy as a means of giving full scope to his vision of ministry. He was very much the up-and-coming young man of the younger generation of Anglo-Catholics, in an Oxford where Pusey and his principal disciple H.P.Liddon were now fighting not to make the University Puseyite, but to keep it barely Christian: combing the hair of a corpse as Liddon in his bleaker moods described it. Gore did all the right things: taking curacies in urban Liverpool parishes with priests who had been imprisoned for ritual offences, teaching at the high church theological college at Cuddesdon, working in India for the Oxford Mission to Calcutta. It was natural therefore that when a Principal was needed for the new national memorial to Pusey after his death in 1882, Gore should be chosen: Pusey House in Oxford was to be the scene of some of his most inspiring work.

His charismatic talents made themselves known at once: he was the most powerful religious influence in the whole University, constantly surrounded by young men seeking spiritual advice or simply captivated by the (rather gruff) charm and religious strength of his personality. He was well served by those who worked with him: for some years, a group of his friends had agreed to live under a rule of life which committed them to a regime of personal austerity and pastoral work, and out of this ‘Holy Club’ as it was called grew the Community of the Resurrection, the first truly stable religious order for men in the Church of England, which to this day continues the original inspiration of its founders by training ordinands for the priesthood at its mother house at Mirfield. It seemed that Gore in his mid thirties was now at the height of his powers, the natural successor of Pusey and the new leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England.

However, it was at this moment that Gore and his friends stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy, and marked themselves out as more radical in their thinking that the older generation were happy to accept. Pusey had made it his life’s work to defend the Old Testament from the attacks made upon it by liberal German criticism, and consequently the older Anglo-Catholics were very conservative in their attitude to the Bible. Gore and his friends published in 1889 a collection of essays entitled Lux Mundi, in which they showed themselves ready to accept many of the critical conclusions their predecessors had fought against so strongly. In Gore’s case, he was prepared to accept that Our Lord’s human knowledge was limited by the circumstances of the incarnation, that what He knew of history and science was what any Palestinian Jew of His day knew. This meant that if Christ taught that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale, or that King David wrote a particular psalm, we need not take it as literally true, because he was speaking from within the limitations of His place and time. This was theological dynamite, and many of those who had looked to Gore as a leader and teacher were aghast: he had made Liberal Catholicism a new force to be reckoned with.

And it wasn’t only in the theological world that Gore was courting controversy: through the Christian Social Union he made Pusey House something of a centre for radical political thinking in the University, inviting Trades Unionists and Labour leaders to address meetings and give an account of their beliefs, at a time when involvement in social reform and industrial action were dismissed as the work of agitators. This combination of liberal biblical criticism and left-wing political attitudes was hardly what people had expected in the Principal of the ‘Puseum’, and in 1893 Gore left Oxford to take over with his Community of the Resurrection the parish of Radley. He was not a great success as a parish priest: he took tremendous pains over everything, but he was very thin-skinned and very subject to depression in the face of the hardships and difficulties faced by his people. On one occasion he wrote an enormous letter to the bishop explaining his difficulties, to which the bishop simply replied: My dear Gore, don’t be a bore. In the end the young radical firebrand was rescued by that wily old conservative the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who offered him a canonry at Westminster Abbey. At Westminster he was able to develop his skill as a preacher, and to write several outstanding works of theology; he also pursued his commitment to radical politics, in both church and state, as he had become a fierce advocate for freedom from state control in the appointment of bishops and the regulation of the church’s life. For a while he and Hensley Henson were canons together: the rows which they kept up caused the scholarly Dean Armitage Robinson to escape to the quieter close at Wells.

It was Lord Salisbury who stepped in once more to offer him the see of Worcester in 1901, a choice which was ideal for him because at that time the diocese of Worcester included the whole of Birmingham. None of the original leaders of the Anglo-Catholic revival had been made bishops, and although the saintly Edward King had been Bishop of Lincoln since 1885, he was no radical in the political sense: his last public act was to vote against the introduction of old age pensions in 1911. The prospect of a high church bishop for low church non-conformist Birmingham, a Christian socialist among some of the most hard headed capitalists around , created an immense stir: what would Gore do? As a bishop he was a triumph, full of crusading zeal for social and moral reform, constantly occupied in preaching and teaching, winning the hearts of those who had been alarmed at his coming. By 1905 he had raised enough money to endow a new diocese of Birmingham, of which he was proud to become first bishop: his statue outside Birmingham Cathedral today is a fitting memorial to his spiritual stature as pastor and prophet. However, he did not think much of his fellow bishops, whom he thought had no conception of discipline either in matters of doctrine or ritual, and by 1911 he was seriously considering accepting the diocese of Bombay. In the end, he went instead to the diocese of Oxford with its six hundred and seventy parishes, and was unhappy there almost from the start.

Gore had made his name with a radical thesis which seemed to overturn the accepted Anglo-Catholic attitude to the Bible; however, as a bishop he was not prepared to allow the clergy to continue to hold office if they did not profess belief in the miracles of the Gospels, and most especially the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Christ. His attempts to enforce this discipline went on without the real support of his fellow bishops, who sought to avoid confrontation for the sake of keeping the show on the road. For Gore this came to a head in 1917 when his old sparring partner Hensley Henson was made Bishop of Hereford: Henson did not believe in the virgin birth, and Gore’s efforts to prevent his appointment going forward did not prevail with his fellow bishops. Gore also was disillusioned with the attitude of his fellow bishops towards ritual: Gore was strict in trying to keep the use of ritual within the bounds of the law, even if that meant certain practices of which he approved had to be given up. At one stage he even banned the English Hymnal because of the line in one hymn: For the faithful gone before us may the Holy Virgin pray. He repeatedly saw his efforts to enforce the law as he saw it undermined not only by advanced high churchmen whom he saw as his natural allies, but also by the weakness of bishops in other dioceses who connived at allowing what he with a heavy heart felt he must prohibit. The final straw came in 1919, when the Church Assembly for which he had worked for so long as a means to give the Church of England its freedom was set up: Gore felt passionately that only confirmed and communicant members should be entitled to vote on the new electoral rolls; when the franchise was opened to all the baptised he resigned his see.

Gore’s last years were perhaps his greatest: he lived in a flat at All Saints’ Margaret Street, where his zest for life returned and where he could dedicate himself once again to teaching and preaching and inspiring those around him with a sense of the reality of the Christian religion and the truth of its central doctrines. His fellow bishops could still outrage him: he was implacably opposed to the decision of the Lambeth conference in 1930 to permit the use of contraception, which he saw as the end of the Christian moral life as it was ordered in the family. But to all who knew him, he gave a vivid impression of nearness to God: on his death bed in 1932, the Archbishop of Canterbury heard him say ‘transcendent glory’ as he slipped out of consciousness into the next world.

Why should Gore be of interest to us today? He stands as a bridge between the first Anglo-Catholics of the nineteenth century and our own time: as a young man he knew Pusey, but he lived well into the last century, and indeed Father Donald once met him. He is also the first of the Anglo-Catholic leaders who threw himself whole–heartedly into the business of testing out the Church of England as a viable system for teaching the Catholic faith, and the first to translate the social concern of men like Lowder into a distinctive political outlook. Gore’s Liberal Catholicism has been adopted in our own time by those who see him as a prophetic figure: non-Roman in his doctrine and use of ritual; willing to embrace the insights of modern knowledge; committed to a radical social teaching as an integral part of Christian witness. However, Gore was also the man who resigned rather than continue as a bishop in a church which seemed to have no fixed credal and doctrinal standards; the man who longed for the Church of England to be free from the trammels of state control; the man who said that he was tired of fighting as a ‘hired gladiator’ for causes in which he felt unsupported and let down. As we conclude this series on the heroes of the Catholic Revival, we do so faced with a certain ambiguity in the Anglo-Catholic position which has been present since the beginning, and which for better or for worse we share; Gore typifies it more perhaps than any other of the great names which we have considered. There is a passionate intellectual and spiritual commitment to the reality of the Catholic life of the Church of England, a desire to live within it and transform it so that it might become more truly itself; but also a disillusionment at the harsh realities of entrenched indifference to Catholic faith and order. Cardinal Newman wrote waspishly to Gore when he went to Pusey House: I indulge the welcome thought that in promoting the interests of Pusey’s school, you will eventually be advancing Catholic truth as held and taught at Rome. I’m sure this made Gore furious, but the final verdict on the Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival will rest with the truth or otherwise of what Newman wrote to him, with whom after all, it all began.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mills-mary/mills-00.html below

I n the course of my research, I learned that an English translation of Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) appeared in London in 1938, the same year the book was published in Germany. After obtaining photocopies of the English translation, I discovered that this translation was just one of many publications circulated during the Nazi period by the Friends of Europe, a group opposed to Nazism and dedicated to providing accurate information about Nazi Germany for use throughout Great Britain, the British Empire, the U.S.A., Europe and wherever the English tongue is known.[15] The foreword to the translation had been written by the Rt. Rev. Dr. H. Hensley Henson, who in 1938 was the Bishop of Durham. I wondered what connection an Anglican bishop might have had with the translation of such a disgusting piece of propaganda and was relieved to learn that as early as 1933, Henson had been voicing his concern about Germany's religion of Blood and Race, as a menace to Christendom.[16] In his foreword, Henson exhorts all who desire to form a just estimate of the Anti-semitism of the German State[17] to read the The Poisonous Mushroom.

In 1988 I carried out a short piece of research at St. Deniol's Library, Hawarden to trace the history of infant baptismal conditions within the Church of England and attempts to reform them. The Gorham case of the 1850's stands out quite significantly as a marker. Revd. Gorham , you will remember , took on the Bishop of Exeter over the question of baptismal regeneration. The case went eventually to the Court of Arches and they found in favour of Gorham.

That judgement in itself didn't appear to make a huge difference to practice in the parishes. In 1896 Hensley Henson, who was to become Bishop of Hereford and later ,Durham, used a university sermon at Oxford (he was then vicar of Barking)to condemn the modern practice of infant baptism as 'indecent in itself, discreditable to the church, and highly injurious to religion'. A few years later in 1907 Roland Allen resigned as vicar of Chalfont St. Peter, principally over infant baptism.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/bios/kindly/weston.html

Suddenly the whole of Christendom was startled by a document which Frank Weston pinned upon the door of his cathedral in Zanzibar (as Luther nailed his Theses to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral), announcing that he and his diocese were no longer in communion with John, Bishop of Hereford, and all who adhered to him. Here was a first-class crisis. Dr. Perceval defended himself in the columns of The Times, and gravely rebuked a junior bishop for being a junior. In a headmasterly manner he went out to rap the knuckles of an irresponsible schoolboy, not realizing that to point to the youth and inexperience of his opponent was merely to trail a red-herring across the track.

Then, to Frank Weston, came the crowning blow. Dr. Hensley Henson (who since his elevation to the episcopate has moved steadily towards Catholicism from the advanced trenches of Modernism, and is the most fervent of all advocates of disestablishment) was made a bishop, after a stormy protest by many Churchmen. Modernism had seemingly triumphed. Frank Weston replied by his Christ and His Critics, and began to think of retiring from his See to live a simple Christian life among his Africans.

Making Women Priests

I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.
http://www.churchofengland.freeserve.co.uk/xhhenson.htm

St Paul, I Timothy 2:12.

On The Ordination of Women

Bishop Herbert Hensely Henson (1863-1947)

I think that we are in real danger of exaggerating the novelty of the problem as it presents itself to the modern Church. The Apostles were as well acquainted as we are with the spiritual competence of women. Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, the four prophesying daughters of Philip the evangelist, to say nothing of Euodia and Syntyche, illustrated as fully as any Christian women of later times the ability of individual women to teach, preach, and manage.

Moreover the Church approached the practical problem with a prepossession which was equally inevitable and potent. In the mystery of the Incarnation a woman had been called to play a part which, as its full significance was apprehended, could not but prohibit once and for all every treatment of women by the Christian Church which could really imply inferiority, while it clothed motherhood, woman's distinctive natural function, with an ineffable glory.(page 7).

Nor do I think it is really true that the conditions under which women lived in antiquity were universally or even generally such as to make it practically impossible, if the Lord and His Apostles had so willed, for them to have included women among the regular clergy. Indeed the history of Montanism(note M) suggests that such inclusion would have seemed natural enough.

The significant thing is that, with a frank recognition of the spiritual equality of the sexes, and a familiar acquaintance of the ability of individual Christian women, the Apostles and their immediate successors never introduced them into the number of Bishops and Priests. (page 7/8).

Moreover, the world needs now a faithful fulfilment of woman's normal natural function far more than such an addition to its resources of professional Christian ministry as female ordination can bring. For what is the most menacing evil of our time? Is it not precisely the repudiation of wifely and motherly function by women? ... The world wants desperately, not female priests and bishops, but Christian wives and mothers. When the home is, as St Chrysostom calls it, 'a little church', there is a firm foundation laid on which can be built the fabric of a female ministry in society wide enough to satisfy the keenest individual zeal. The only equality of the sexes which the Church can rightly make the basis of its practical system recognises difference of natural function. ... Only by frankly admitting difference can genuine equality be secured. Subordination is the very principle of ordered society, and it has its first expression and ultimate sanction in the Home.

Christianity is a religion of authority as well as a religion of the spirit. Discipleship involves for all of us obedience and subjection. Membership of the Body of Christ implies separateness of function and co-ordination in activity. Equality is not identity: nor is freedom anarchy. We are all, men and women alike, under obedience: and for us all God's Service is perfect freedom. In discipleship we are committed to the paradox which makes law and liberty inseparable. (page 10)

[All quotes from The Ordination of Women, Bishoprick Papers, 1946].

Susan Howatch, Glittering Images. Knopf, 1987.

-[citing Anglican bishop, H. H. Henson] The marks of Jesus are silently impressed on His true disciples in the normal procedure of life in society as well as in the crises of suffering and martyrdom. p. 258.