Impressions and comments / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Impressions and comments / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY 45 episcopal apparatus in motion. For an Arch¬ bishop of Canterbury has a pubhc function to perform (has not Sydney Smith described a foolometer ?) altogether independent of such reasonable and human functions as he may privately perform. Is this love of torture, by the way, possibly one of the fruits of Empire ? We see it in the Roman Empire, too, and how vigorously it was applied to Christians and other criminals. Christianos ad leones ! But it was a disas¬ trously unsuccessful policy—or we should not have an Archbishop of Canterbury with us now. No disrespect for Archbishops of Canterbury is involved in this recognition of their pubhc function, and I have no wish to be (as Laud wrote of one of my ancestors) a very trouble¬ some man to archbishops. They act auto¬ matically for the measurement of society, merely in the same sense as an individual is automatic¬ ally acting for the measurement of himself when he states how profoundly he admires Mendelssohn or R. L. Stevenson. He thereby registers the particular degree of his own spiritual state. And when an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all that sensitiveness to the atmosphere which his supreme office involves,