Letters to a Sister (24 page)

Do you think a priest should break the seal if a murderer had confessed his crime, but wouldn't tell the police, and an innocent man was going to be hanged for it? Someone says that they can get dispensation to tell, in such a case.... Some one wrote to a paper to say that a priest is bound never to act on information received in confession, and that if someone confessed that he belonged to a gang who meant to murder the priest and his family and were waiting for them on the road they usually went home by, the priest mustn't even change the route because of it. Still, I think he certainly
would. Ought he to lock up his money if someone confessed he was given to stealing it when it lay about? I suppose not. It seems confessions must be quite forgotten and ignored.
I
should have thought the priest ought to remember them, with a view to advising the person in future.

Very much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 29 July, 1957

Dearest Twin,

… What I think would be nice [would be] if you could come up here on Thursday (Aug. 1)
¹⁸¹
in time to come with me to a 1.30 service at St Peter's, Vere Street, a little church quite near me, attached to All Souls', Langham Place, and therefore no doubt Low, but seems to have a series of lunch-hour preachers; some of them are no doubt quite good. Anyhow it is a pretty little 18th century church, and I should rather like a sermon on my birthday, particularly if you would come too. If you came here first (say at 1.0) we could go together, after a snack of lunch in the flat, or better still at a small shop close by, or we could have this after the service, at more leisure. If you would like to do this, it would be very nice.

I only heard half the lona service
¹⁸²
last night, as I had to go out to supper. I hope it was good, as good as last time. I hear the Kirk is very much annoyed by Dr MacLeod, he is so High, and so unlike their dear John Knox, and they suspect him of wanting to take bishops into his system. Perhaps later
on he will go where bishops are, since they won't be allowed where he now is.

There was
such
a rude and unjust article in the 5.
Express
about the C. of E. Did you see it? It was by a peer.
¹⁸³
He says the difference between clergymen and laymen is that they only work one day a week instead of 5 or 6. He obviously knows nothing about it. He calls the Te Deum ‘the Tedium', and thinks all clergy very dim and worthless, and that the only way of waking the church to life would be to ordain women. I suppose there will be a lot of answers, if anyone thinks it worth answering. I think those rude attacks and false statements do a lot of harm among ignorant people.

The Bp of Tewkesbury was in London for the week-end, which was very nice. He came to tea with me on Thursday, and on Friday I went to confession, and on Sunday went to hear him preach in a Royal Chapel,
¹⁸⁴
then drove him to Paddington, so saw a nice lot of him altogether. When I talk to him, I am always converted; a pity it doesn't happen oftener. I hope he converts all the Glos. clergy. I think there are a lot of these very converting priests about the place, actually, only one doesn't always come across them. A young Oxford man told me last night that there are a lot of Moslem conversions in Oxford just now. When I said I wondered what the attraction was, he said he thought it was largely anti-women. They want to worship in a church where any women there are are in galleries behind grilles, instead of outnumbering men on the floor, as in Christian churches. They have even got into Pusey House now, which used to be sacred to men, in Oxford. Now women undergraduates go too. A pity men are so annoyed by women in the mass….

[The end of this letter is missing]

11 August, [1957]

Dearest Jeanie,

I have now looked thro' my birthday present,
¹⁸⁵
and find it full of good reading, both known and unknown to me. There are several William Laws, tho' none from my favourite works of his, but all are good. I have counted the days up to my birthday and yours. Your reading (Day 206) is on Belief and Doubt. Mine (213) is by Keble, and is called ‘To a Lady in her Sickness', and is about the lady's dullness and dryness, which Keble thought was because she wasn't feeling well. Today's is good, from the
Theologia Germanica.
I ought to write the dates in, as it is hard to count every time. Is it Leap Year, because this would put each day later, of course? It would be an interesting occupation to compile such a book; there is room for many more such. One could do it as a sideline, whenever a piece of religious or moral writing struck one, without sparing much time from one's regular work, and gradually one would have collected 365. I think I should give more attention to particular days than Baillie has; in fact, I should do it round the church year. We might collaborate in it, to get it done faster, as our earthly time gets short…. Thank you
so
much for this book, I am delighted with it, and how nice to get a post-birthday present….

The new parking rules which the Ministry of Transport is meaning to bring in soon have been published.
¹⁸⁶
It will be very expensive to leave one's car in the scheduled streets of which Hinde Street is one. 6d. for [the] first hour, 1/- for two hours, after that 10/-, so that 2½ hrs will cost 11/-. I think there will be too much revolt by motorists to let them bring it in; people without garages who live in London will be ruined; and the garage rents will be put up even higher, of course, when people will be so eager for them. Those circularised
are asked to state their objections in letters to the Ministry, and no doubt every one will. I am lucky to have a garage, tho' it will be a nuisance putting it in there every time I have had it out, then getting it out again, as my mews gets very crowded with cars & lorries. What the new rules will do, I hope, is to prevent those outside London from driving up every morning, parking in some street while they go to their offices and shops, and not going home till 6.0. Hinde Street is now full of such cars. If the cost will be 11/-daily, most people won't do it; train & bus would cost them much less. But Londoners will be in a fix. Perhaps it will drive many Londoners to live in the country.

I am getting more and more interested in N. Shute's
On the Beach,
and am longing to know if the radio-active disease will get to the people in a few months. They are all planting trees, buying things for their future lives, and going on as usual. The disease has the symptoms of cholera, but is incurable, and you die in a few days. I won't tell you what happens.

It was v. nice to see you on Friday, looking so smart in your spotty dress, but you must dye your hearing-aid cord blue or navy.

V. much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 14 August, [1957]

Dearest Jeanie,

Many thanks for yours, and for
Race Relations.
¹⁸⁷
I will send them something. But, after hearing the Bishop of Jo'burg,
¹⁸⁸
I feel that African race relations have got past anything money can do, and can only be improved by mutual good feeling and justice….

I hope you managed to hear the ‘Brains Trust' at lunch time. It was quite good. All but Violet Bonham Carter were far too tolerant of Trades Union violence—as she said, they seem a privileged class. All this violence is very dreadful. And why on earth are homicidal maniacs allowed to leave their hospitals ‘on parole' and murder children without being caught, then return to their hospitals still free to take walks? Do you think that poor little boy
¹⁸⁹
was killed by the same one who murdered the little girl and boy lately?
¹⁹⁰
But, from tonight's
Evening Standard,
it seems that his uncle Colin is under suspicion. Perhaps he is known to be mad, tho' not shut up. But wouldn't his relations have known that? How dreadful madness is!…

I suppose I should choose ‘Love one another', as the essential Christian approach. Certainly not ‘Come unto me all you that labour', like that lazy schoolboy.

I think I shall read
Enigma,
Arnold Lunn's book about M.R.A.
¹⁹¹
I think its aims are to encourage more thinking about goodness—the four virtues—and to make people aim at them more vigorously, and think they are all that matters. I am interested that a R.C. should approve of it so much….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

25 August,[1957]

Dearest Jeanie,

Here is yesterday's
Times
sermon. Also the second bit of Old Age from the
Church Times.
¹⁹²
I think it might suggest more pastimes for the old—raffia work, painting, sketching, patience, compiling anthologies of their favourite quotations, etc., etc. But perhaps the whole book does. I may take to sticking scraps, pictures, etc., on a screen, when too old to write. There are endless sedentary pursuits which are amusing & soothing.

I see there is supposed to be a R.C. plot to convert England to the Church by radio. It seems there are a great number of them in useful places on the B.B.C. and TV, who are prepared to allow as much R.C. religion as they safely can, and it is all aimed at conversion, the R.C. Radio Guild says, not merely for their own flock. I wonder what effect it will have. It will be interesting to see. I hope it will be a counter-attraction to the Evangelical school. That is the school of Christianity I would least rather see getting popular, tho' I suppose it does encourage right conduct. Middle and High Anglicanism will never, I fear, do much conversion here; it seems, like Liberalism, too much of a middle way, and what people like are extremes. I suppose I shall hear next week at Oxford how international Lib: is getting on.
¹⁹³
…

I have been reading Maisie Ward's
The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition,
volume 2, called
Insurrection and Resurrection?
¹⁹⁴
about the death of the Modernist movement, in which her father
¹⁹⁵
took a great interest, but was on the whole against it. Tyrrell, Von Hügel, Abbé Bremond, and other Modernists
come into it. M.W. says the movement is now quite defeated. I wonder if it will ever rise again. The R.C. authorities are so careful about it that when a French book about ‘The Religious Thought of Von Hügel' was published some years ago, the English version
¹⁹⁶
had to have all the parts about Modernism cut out; as this was one of his major interests, it must read oddly. But he had to be made out absolutely orthodox.
¹⁹⁷
…

Did you hear the discussion between two educationists the other day on public schools?
¹⁹⁸
Both thought that a good education was too important to be bought for one's children when many parents can't afford to. I wonder if it is really more unfair than other advantages for one's children being bought. This idea of exact equality is growing….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 [4 September, 1957]

Dearest Jeanie,

... I got back from Oxford on Saturday, seldom having heard so much hot air blown off in 4 days. Foreigners really are very airy. They propose resolutions like sending telegrams to Russia telling them to get out of Hungary, and think they have proposed something useful. However, they enjoyed meeting other Liberals, and enjoyed talking and seeing Oxford, which was looking very lovely in sunshine…. I stayed at a nice hotel near Magdalen (where the conference
was), with a pleasant staff, and a schoolboy doing porter's work for the holidays, who told me how pleased he was to meet me, as they had been doing me (among other literature) at his school, so he was eager to carry my suitcase upstairs. I talked to Dr Micklem,
¹⁹⁹
but hadn't time to ask him about the Congregational Church. I must consult him later. Today I lunched with Douglas Woodruff, the editor of
The Tablet,
and discussed the R.C. Church 1922-37, about which of course he knows a lot. I discuss the C. of E. with Susan Lister… and others. I do know something about M.R.A. and Quakerism, of course…. But Douglas Woodruff tells me that it [Moral Rearmament] is now out of bounds for R.C.s so they can't go any longer for holidays at Caux.
²⁰⁰
It is silly of the Pope, as apparently it sent R.C.s back to their church duties when they had grown neglectful.

I have been reading a novel in which a wife's husband, an artist, disappears during the war and is reported killed, and she presently marries again and has two more children, and after 11 years she hears from Italy that her first husband has been living in the house of an old countess, blind, but she can't keep him any more. What would you have done? And what would be right to do? What she & her second husband agree to do is that she should go out and live with him, with her two elder children, leaving the 2nd family with the 2nd husband. She loves the second one best. I think I should have divorced the 1st for desertion, as he had deliberately given himself out for dead, being tired of his old life. He was quite a bad & selfish man.

I am now reading
Angel,
by Elizabeth Taylor, which is amusing, about a bad but best-selling novelist. I have Ivy Compton-Burnett's new one,
²⁰¹
which I will bring. I also read
Behold your King,
by Naomi Mitchison, the story of Good Friday, vivid, but has faults of style. I'm glad to see that it
rejects the idea of Mary Magdalene as a harlot, for which there is no evidence at all.... I must now go out to hear Edith Sitwell read her poems, to restore an old R.C. chapel in a country house, the only chapel in England where Mass has been said continuously for over 400 years.
²⁰²

V. much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 15 September, [1957]