Letters to a Sister (41 page)

Read Letters to a Sister Online

Authors: Constance Babington Smith

267
In the ‘Benedictine Community' on Caldey Island.

268
According to legend, T. B. Macaulay's sister Fanny and John Cropper, a Quaker who was connected with the manufacture of paper and also of gunpowder ‘for industrial purposes' had been discussing the ethical problems involved in the latter case.

269
Rt Rev. Cyril Eastaugh.

270
Details of an Anglo-American agreement on the establishment of missile sites in Britain were published on 24 February.

271
Christ's
acceptance
of war was what I meant; see Mark 13.7, ‘And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be.'

272
Abp Joost de Blank,
Uncomfortable Words
(1958).

273
A meeting at the Holborn Hall on 24 February, when the Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr Henry Brooke) was to speak on the new Rent Act, had ended in uproar and brawling.

274
A very small scroll inscribed with the ten commandments.

275
A Roman Catholic authority comments that R.M.'s rendering of her friend's remarks is open to serious misunderstanding.

276
This was a letter from C. S. Lewis to Dorothea Conybeare, who had asked him to explain the title of his book
Till We Have Faces.
He pointed out that it was a quotation from a remark in the book itself (p. 305), ‘How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces?' ‘The idea,' he continued, ‘was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil or
persona.'

277
A weekly religious broadcast programme.

278
The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.

279
David Trevor (Orthopaedic Consultant Surgeon to Charing Cross Hospital and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital), who had operated on R.M.

280
Mary Anne O'Donovan.

281
Rev. Donald Mason.

282
Sir Charles Wheeler.

283
John R. Dummelow, editor of
A Commentary on the Holy Bible
(1909).

284
Selina Dummelow became a Deaconess and was one of Margaret Macaulay's friends.

285
A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, edited by
C.
Gore, H. L. Goudge and A. Guillaume
(1928).

286
A new high altar at St Paul's Cathedral, to replace that destroyed by bombs in 1940, was consecrated by the Bishop of London on 7 May.

287
Guido Reni's ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds' was bought by the National Gallery in 1957; Nicolas Poussin's ‘The Adoration of The Golden Calf in 1945.

288
‘Square Search', a broadcast play by Redmond Macdonogh.

289
A Mass Rally of the Layman Trust Society on 15 May. The purpose of the society is ‘the linking of citizenship with Christianity'

290
Rev. Jonathan Graham, who had succeeded Rev. Raymond Raynes as Father Superior of the Community of the Resurrection.

291
On 17 May outdoor processions were part of the annual festival of the Society of Mary, an Anglo-Catholic organization.

292
Janet Lacey, of the Inter-Church Aid and Refugee Service Department, British Council of Churches.

293
A bus strike which had begun in London on 5 May did not end until 21 June.

294
Lady Juliet Duff.

295
R.M. was planning to go on a cruise to the Greek Islands and the Black Sea in August.

296
This correspondence originated in comment on a leader about relations between the Churches of England and Scotland in
The Times
of 17 May. A letter from Peter J. Harrison (22 May) was chiefly concerned with Intercommunion, and others on this subject followed.

297
A letter from E. B. Sims, whose views on Intercommunion coincided with R.M.'s.

298
This was just before General de Gaulle was voted back to power (after the Algerian insurrection and the Corsican revolt had led to the resignation of the Prime Minister, M. Pflimlin).

299
The Times
published three letters in favour of Intercommunion on 29 May.

300
The ‘Bishops' Report' (which examined ways of bringing together the Churches of England and Scotland, and recommended the appointment of ‘Bishops-in-Presbytery') was debated in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on 27 May.

301
Rt Rev. G. F. B. Morris, Bishop of the Church of England in South Africa (elected in 1955), had protested against the invitation of Abp Makarios to the Lambeth Conference, on grounds that he was associated with ‘violence, treachery, and murder'.

302
Major Gen. Sir Edward Spears had written to the Abp of Canterbury protesting against the inviting of Abp Makarios, adding that if the Abp came, he hoped to help relatives of men who had been murdered in Cyprus to arrange for his arrest.

303
R. M. here re-echoes her misconception of the English reaction to the visit of Nicholas I of Russia in 1844, see above p. 184
n
.

304
The final letter in a correspondence on ‘Everlasting punishment' was published on 1 June.

305
A broadcast programme of Evening Prayers conducted by Rev. Ronald Falconer.

306
‘The Church and England', a talk by Rev. Joseph McCulloch.

307
On 17 June, 1958 the Abp of Canterbury (Dr Fisher) admitted, during a debate in the Church Assembly, that the Church of England Enquiry Centre had ceased to function owing to financial difficulties.

308
This comment was made by Rev. Prof. W. R. Forrester of St Andrews in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on 27 May.

309
Rt Rev. E. K. C. Hamilton, (1890-1962).

310
R.M. was on the way back to London after a week-end at Long Crichel House.

311
A Christian Action conference held at Westcott House, Cambridge.

312
This is à propos of
Seven Years Solitary
(1957) by Edith Bone, a former Communist who was imprisoned in Hungary for seven years.

313
Two Anglican Essays
(1958).

314
One Army Strong?
(1958).

315
R.M. was probably thinking of letters from Margaret Knight and Colin McCall (Secretary of the National Secular Society) in the recent correspondence on ‘Everlasting punishment' in
The Observer.

316
See
News Chronicle,
10 June, 1958. James Cameron's article was entitled ‘A tough baby lands in Mr Lloyd's lap'.

317
R.M. means the Liturgical Commission for the Revision of the Prayer Book, which is not concerned with the revision of the Canons.

318
Rt Rev. G. E. Ingle.

319
Rt Rev. R. A. Reeves.

320
A meeting organized by Christian Action.

321
Rev. Thomas Corbishley, s.j.

322
See above p.
266η.

323
See above, p.
272n
.

324
Venice Besieged.

325
The Prime Minister was to present the British plan for Cyprus to Parliament that afternoon.

326
Interruptions by hecklers when the Bp of Johannesburg addressed the recent Christian Action meeting were reported in detail in
The Times.

327
Two Anglican Essays,
see above p. 272.

328
The Leper missionary (1840-89).

329
The Bp of Rochester, Rt Rev. C. M. Chavasse, preaching on 13 July at a Territorial Army jubilee service at Rochester Cathedral, had said that total destruction and possibly a lingering death for any survivors would be a lesser evil than serfdom under a totalitarian domination. He said pacifists preached that it was best to save one's skin at any price, and attributed to them the responsibility for the ‘stupidity and iniquity of the second world war'.

330
A letter from R.M. to
The Times
in defence of pacifism was published on 15 July. She called the Bp of Rochester's accusation about ‘saving one's skin' ‘an exact reversal of the fact'.

331
Jean Macaulay had sent a cutting from the
News Chronicle
of 14 July, reporting that the Rev. R. C. Gaul, of Rand, Lincs., had said from his pulpit that ‘the Bishop of Rochester is bloody-minded enough to see no difference in principle between bows and arrows and the H-bomb.'

332
In
The Fearful Choice: A Debate on Nuclear Policy conducted by Philip Toynbee
(1958) Abp Fisher had commented that he was convinced it was never right to settle any policy simply out of fear of the consequences. He said that for all he knew it was within the providence of God that the human race should destroy itself by means of nuclear war, adding that there is no evidence that the human race is to last for ever and plenty in Scripture to the contrary effect.

333
After the Army revolt in Iraq, President Chamoun of Lebanon had appealed to the U.S. for forces to help maintain security, and 1500 marines landed at Beirut on 15 July.

334
In
The Observer
of 6 July ‘Pendennis' had written of Abp Fisher '… he is unexpectedly self-critical, and (unlike Canon Collins) often admits he is wrong.' The following week a letter from Lord Pakenham was published saying of Canon Collins ‘I have found him very different from that, and full of Christian humility.'

335
A dinner given by the Grocers' Company.

336
Canon E. G. de S. Wood, Vicar of St Clement's, Cambridge from 1885 to 1931, was an Anglo-Catholic who advocated the daily Eucharist.

337
The Bp of Rochester (Rt Rev. C. M. Chavasse) at a recent Diocesan Conference had recommended twice-monthly celebration of Holy Communion, once in the morning and once in the evening.

338
Rev. K. N. Ross, Vicar of All Saints', Margaret St.

339
R.M. had been interviewed in this programme on 20 July.

340
William Clark, Nicholas Fenn, and Alec Robertson.

341
‘The Voyage of the Beagle' by H. A. L. Craig, a ‘dramatized reconstruction of some events in Darwin's five-year cruise', was one of the broadcasts to mark the centenary of the theory of evolution.

342
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
which R.M. had given her.

343
R. A. Knox, in his translation of the New Testament, renders this passage as follows: ‘the man who puts away his wife (setting aside… unfaithfulness) makes an adulteress of her'. In a footnote he comments, ‘The Greek word here translated “setting aside” has commonly been taken as meaning “unless she is unfaithful”, but it can also be interpreted as meaning “whether she is unfaithful or not”.'

344
Postcard.

345
R. H. Macaulay (1858-1937), R.M.'s uncle and godfather.

346
Postcard.

347
Rev. G. R. W. Beaumont.

348
The Resolution on Family Planning (in the Report of the 1958 Lambeth Conference) asserted that the responsibility for deciding the number and frequency of children has been laid by God on the consciences of parents. This ‘requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society'.

349
Postcard.

350
See
The Queen,
30 September, 1958, ‘The New Argonauts'. 287

351
The
News Chronicle
(22 September, 1958) reported that members of the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War had been picketing the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston for 9 weeks continuously.

352
Jean Macaulay had enclosed a leader by James Cameron
(News Chronicle,
22 September) on a ‘new order for teen-agers' in Communist China: ‘Youth to work by day, study by night.'

353
R.M. means St Paul's, Portman Square.

354
Gerard Irvine points out that the observation beginning ‘or else' is an addition by R.M. to what he had said.

355
Helmut Rueckriegel.

356
Rev. F. E. P. Langton.

357
One of R.M.'s godmothers.

358
When R.M.'s flat was bombed.

359
The missionary hospital in the Transvaal where Jean Macaulay nursed in 1938-9. Subsequently she was always a keen supporter.

360
A. S. C. Ross, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, ‘Strix' [Peter Fleming], Christopher Sykes, and John Betjeman,
Noblesse Oblige
(1956).

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