THE friends of the late Henry Scott Holland founded a lectureship in his memory, the Deed of Foundation laying it down that a course of lectures, to be called the Holland Memorial Lectures, are to be delivered triennially, having for their subject ‘the religion of the incarnation in its bearing on the social and economic life of man’. The first course of these lectures was delivered by Mr R. H. Tawney at King’s College, London, in March and April 1922, but it is only now, more than three years later, that the work of preparing them for publication has been completed, and that I have been called upon, as the chairman of the Holland Trustees, to introduce our first series of lectures to the public. They are a historical study of the religion of the Reformation in its bearing on social and economic thought. We have been for many years feeling our want of such a study, sufficiently documented and grounded upon an adequate knowledge of the literature of the period, as we have watched the modern battle between zealous medievalists impugning the Reformation as deeply responsible for the sins of modern industrialism, and no less zealous Protestants rebutting the charge or throwing it back. At last, I believe, we have got what is required, and that many besides myself will find in the book a permanent source of enlightenment and a just and well-grounded judgement. I am thankful to feel that the first series of Holland lectures is a worthy tribute to the memory of a man who set his brilliant faculties to work in no cause so fully and heartily as in that of re-awakening the conscience of Englishmen to the social meaning of the religion of the Incarnation, and who felt as much as anyone the need of accurate research into the causes which have so disastrously obscured it.
October 1925 |
CHARLES GORE |