Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton.

  • Thomas Hodgkin
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    453/494 (page 411)
    contentiousness or personal feeling. He always wished to give people credit for good intentions and laboured earnestly and sympathetically to understand both sides that he might bring opponents together. It is very rare to find, even in his most private letters or diaries, anything that the severest critic could call an unkindly, critical, or prejudiced remark. The suspicion of prejudice and want of understanding and sympathy comes out more than anywhere else in his attitude towards what he called Anglo-Catholic opinion. This came no doubt mainly from what has been described as ‘ a natural shrinking from creeds and ceremonies. His was rather a rich and joyous Catholicism which somehow had overleapt all symbolic expression/ 1 His son-in-law, Herbert Gresford Jones, writes: It was at Family Prayers that he revealed himself most intimately. No one privileged to share in that calm and wide-hearted circle with which the day began— children and grandchildren, guests and servants forming in their varied postures one quiet, composite whole— would ever forget at once the depth and the joyousness of the impression. First a terse, deep-voiced summary of the argument—whether of Prophet or Apostle—then the resonant, impressive reading, and finally, after the long characteristic pause, the fervent, comprehensive, paternal Prayer. The reality of the moment was infectious; still more the indefinable joyousness with which this domestic exercise of Faith and Charity opened at his touch the varied programme of each new day. No kind of party spirit ever found expression in his historical writing. In reading his history we feel that the craftsman is largely lost in the prophet. His study of the struggle of nations and ideas culminated in his love of freedom. He was no sectarian, no mere party man— he stood for all that concerned the welfare of humanity— he claimed that the true reformer cannot have sectarian aims. Above all, he believed in the mighty and energising power of the Christian Faith. He lived his faith.2 1 Harold Anson in The Commonwealth. See Appendix. 2 G, Newman.