Herbert Hensley Henson (known as Hensley; born 1863 in London, died 1947 in Hintlesham, Suffolk) was an Anglican priest, a controversialist and Bishop of Durham. In the public eye from 1892 after an outburst at a diocesan conference in which he referred to dissenting Protestant churches as “emissaries of Satan”, Henson provoked some bemusement among his peers by entitling his autobiography Retrospect of an Unimportant Life.
Henson was conscious t...
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Herbert Hensley Henson (known as Hensley; born 1863 in London, died 1947 in Hintlesham, Suffolk) was an Anglican priest, a controversialist and Bishop of Durham. In the public eye from 1892 after an outburst at a diocesan conference in which he referred to dissenting Protestant churches as “emissaries of Satan”, Henson provoked some bemusement among his peers by entitling his autobiography Retrospect of an Unimportant Life.
Henson was conscious that a significant part of a diocesan bishop’s job must be to accept the responsibilities of a “great national officer”, and even before his elevation to the episcopal bench never avoided speaking his mind publicly on matters which he felt appropriate for a cleric, and continued to do so until his retirement in 1941.
In the aftermath of the second Dreyfus trial of 1899, Henson castigated the French Roman Catholic Church in his published sermons. In 1912, while canon of Westminster Abbey, he named from the pulpit the three British directors of...
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