Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
General
Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896
Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
Benson family
falling far below classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as
verbally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather curiously,
collations of differing texts did not engage him, nor did he touch on
Higher Criticism. The text of his own Greek Testament was all that
concerned him, there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the
full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without criticism but
minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it actually and traditionally
was.
From Monday morning until Saturday night these weeks at Addington,
especially at Christmas, were to us a whirl of delightful activities
from the moment that chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the
morning, till evening service at ten o’clock at night. But Sunday was a
day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly seemed to belong to
Addington at all. There was early communion in the chapel, unless it was
celebrated after the eleven o’clock service in church; morning service
in church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family walk during
which my father read George Herbert to us; the walk was succeeded by a
Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service
in church, and after Sunday supper, he read the _Pilgrim’s Progress_
aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up intervals we might
read certain Sunday books, the more mature successors of Bishop Heber
and _The Rocky Island_ and _Agathos_. No shoal of relaxation emerged
from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became
too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels; there was
even a set of special graces before and after meals to be used on
Sunday, consisting of short versicles and responses quite bewildering to
any guest staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were
played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labour
on the part of servants. However fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no
toboggan that day made its perilous descent, and though the pond might
be spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on the Day of
Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on
reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like
“ducks and drakes,” from one religious exercise to another, relentlessly
propelled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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