King of Terrors

When not riding, shooting and going about the business of several country missions, I've been sorting through some of my father's writing, including an unpublished book on Canon Henry Scott Holland.

HSH became Dean of St. Paul's in the late nineteenth century and was a leading light in the Lux Mundi school of the 2nd Oxford Movement. He was a great priest, not least in his work for the poor.

Lytellton had this to say about him, in The Mind and Character of Henry Scott Holland:

"In writing a tentative estimate of a great personality there is a danger of profanity, the attempt to probe what is intended to be a mystery. How can anyone dare to discriminate between any natural character and that which grows from a man being 'born anew': or to indicate the nature of the hidden struggle against temptation; how all fleshly desires are more and more turned into stepping stones to higher things; how the single heart takes the place of the perverse and distempered will; how the craving for approval even of good men 'melts like wax' before the light of the Divine Countenance, as it is lifted up before the wondering eyes; what, in short, is the nature of the self-conquest which is needed if the Holy Spirit is to achieve the miracle of transformation?"

HSH is mostly forgotten now, perhaps that will change. The name of the upcoming book is The King of Terrors, the Theology of Henry Scott Holland.

God bless,

LSP