Painted Windows / Studies in Religious Personality

live in Swiss cottages and sit on three-legged or one-legged stools; whether people ought to dress well or ill; whether ladies ought to tie their hair in beautiful knots; whether Commerce or Business

th while to ascertain any of these things; whether one's tongu

etism to delude right judgment, I think that the figure of Dean Inge may emerge from the dim and too crowded tapestry of our peri

gle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an a

awful, dismal

stle moves the

bjects tender

s cold unmeani

ere the Dean of St. Paul's, looking at one moment like Don Quixote, at another like a figure from the pages of Dostoevsky, and flitting almost noiselessly about rooms which would surely have been filled for the mind of Dickens with ghosts of bot

avy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly f

of an undertaker's window; but the smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant, quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and immediately

admonishment and active benevolence of Mrs. Inge. As it is, he is something more than shabby, and only escapes a disreputable appearance by the finest of hairs, resembling, as I have sugge

the intellect, a man who cares most deeply for accurate thought, and is absorbed body, soul and spirit in the contemplation of eternal values, sti

wer, courage, and unassailable allegiance to truth. He is careless of appearance because he has something far better worth the while of his attention; he is aloof and remote, monosyllabic and sometimes even inacce

ruth, suggests in his conversation the spirit that shows in the more controversial of his essays. On the contrary, he is in manner, bearing, and spirit a true mystic, a man of silence and meditation, gentle when he is not angered, mode

id to me on one occasion, "but if no on

sentence unfinished which is suffi

are those movements of the time which c

and when I questioned him he replied that Bergson's teach

n's judgment for unpleasantness-the unpleasantness of telling people not to

act-an unbroken uniformity of natural law. We must not dream; we must act, and, before we act, we must think. Human nature does not change very greatly. Bergson is apt to encourage easy o

m by a short cut, or jump to the moon in an excess of emotional fervour. It is a generation which becomes a crowd, and "individuals are occasionally

e who is not content to be the average man." Democracy means "a victory of sentiment over reason"; it is the triumph of the unfit, the ascendan

s that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that

igion. See things as they are. Accept human nature for what it is.

litics, so he

of the evangelical; to rescue it from these obscuring unessentials, and to set it clearly before the eyes of mankind in the pure region of thought-a divine philosophy which teaches the only true

the roots the lust of accumulation. It brings man face to face with a choice that is his destiny. He must think, he must decide. He cannot serve both God and Mammon. Either his life must be given for the imperishable values of spiritual existence or for the meats that perish and the flesh that will see corruption. Let a man choose. Christianity contradicts all his na

e has disciplined his reason to understand this great matter, must

ir worth. Among the poor, he quotes, "generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition

ith all our mind, as wel

the humble and the poor

n, and through that doorway the poor and the ignorant may pass to find the satisfaction of the saint. But they must be careful to love the right things-to love truth, goodnes

d poor, learned and ignorant, all must accept, with humility, the teaching of the Master. Plotinus, he points out, was the sch

st. Always he is calling upon men to drop their prejudices and catchwords, to forsake their conceits and sentiments, to face Truth with a qu

whatever has entered into the matter. He is a conservative modernist because his reason has convinced him of the truth of reasonable modernism, because he has "that

essential to Christianity. No Virgin Birth, no Sermon on the Mount! No Resurrection of the Body, no Parable of the Prodigal Son! No Descent into Hell, no revelation that the Kingdom of Heav

voice from heaven. It is not the Christ of tradition before whom he bows his knee, but the Christ of history, the Christ of faith, the Christ of experience-the living and therefore the evolving Christ. And for him, as f

ficult to say," he replied. He was thinking, I am sure, of Troeltsch's significant prophecy, and warn

n, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says Baron von Hügel, "bear upon th

s in his two little volumes, The Church and the Age and Speculum Anim?, and of course more numerous still in his great work on Plotinus[5]. He is far more a mystic than a modernist. Indeed I regard him as the Erasmus of modernism, one so sure of truth that he would trust time to work f

y of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent

That is primitive, therefore it is good," and others, "This is up-to-da

g of Catholic Mod

arly all that M. Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the Kingdom of God which Christ preached was something much more than a platonic dream. We believe that He did spe

m?, a most valuable and most beautiful littl

s the most distressing divergency. But

is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we co

stimony the pessimistic agnosticism

or to which I fo

he door has no key b

y hear the echo of our own voices is

nely communing with His Father, on the mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and

is the religious teacher, not the religiou

we see; and what

o simplify our religion an

our faith upon the pure God-consciousness, the eternal world which to Ch

be happy, happier t

ly experienced that truth as a philosophy of life, it is because of this, and not out of a lack of sympathy with the sad and so

tandards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which demonetises the old. Spiritual goods are unlimited in amount; they are increased by being shared; a

f the world by creating new values." Only in the curr

y a critic both of the ritualist and the socialist-two terms which on the former side at least tend to become synonymous. He would have no distraction from the mys

lied. Then, in a lower key, "It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality." How d

oodness, absolute beauty. No breath from the class-rooms agitated by Einstein can shake his faith in these absolutes. His Spirit of the Universe is absolute truth, absolute goodness, absolute beauty. He

nal, so deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with the institutions and manners of the country, or so powerful in its influences on national character." But this was written in 1872. Dr. Inge says now, "The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions, tastes, and prejudices of

ference, in its insistence on re-ordination. Imagine the Church of England, with two Scotch Archbishops at its head, thinking that the Presbyterians would consent to so humiliating a condition! An interchange of pulpi

ident of His earthly life. Rome, he thinks, is a falling power, but she may get back some of her strength in any great industrial calamity-a revolution, for example. Someone once asked him which he would choose, a Black

g bodies of his enemies to corpses." It is the contempt both of a great scholar and a great Englishman for ignorance and a somewhat ludicrous pretension. "The caput orb

shamed than the little lump in the throat which the Englishman feels when he

in progress. The new type of Christianity will be more Christian than the old, because it will be more moral. A numbe

er in the hearts and minds of men who have at length learned the val

nevertheless patient of change. He does not lead as decisively as he might. He does not strike as often as he should at the head of error. Perhaps he is still thinking. Perhaps he has not yet

to one fatal deficiency in his mysticism. It is, I presume to suggest, a mysticism which is separated by no gulf from egoism-egoism of the highest order and the most spiritual c

: "Yes, I'm afraid it's a bad time for the ordinary man." But then he has laid it down, "There is not the slightest probability that the largest crowd will ever be gather

ritualists who have nothing to say and who perform ceremonies they don't understand; not much meaning there for the modern man. No; preaching is a most important

necessary to convert unintelligent people. That woul

he doctors; but he was not a ritualist; he did not even adopt the eastward position. The modern ritualist is hardly to be considered the lineal descendant of t

clear thinking and rigorou

en then few suspected him of original genius until he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1907. His attempts to be a schoolmaster were unsuccessful. He was not good at maintaining discipline, and deafness somewhat intensified a nervous irritability which at times puts an enormous strain on his pa

uggestive of a London Particular, I will quote in conclusion a few of the many witty epigrams which are scattered throughout his pages,

a necessity when most people

established; but beds of exotics cannot be raised by keeping the g

all with their fellow-men to believe that the

iotism varies from a noble

r each other in their eagerness to be

s an hour must be five times as civil

in our intellectual and moral adornments since p

in succession every path except the right one, may pay

lutions in favour of vegetarianism, whil

he apologists for the pries

before the fire of life without

s, "Progress, Democracy, Corporate Unity," as by the blessed word Mesopotamia, or, l

ear the Zeitgeist invoked to

not to float with the stream, a feat w

e end of the human c?cum as at the

centuries" are the traditions of

n the name of one's son on the day he is born, one must write well ahead of that: 'I am expecting to have a son next year,

and its consecration-children to whom the Dean of St. Paul's reveals in their nurse

ntellect has the range of an Acton, his forthrightness is the match of Dr. Johnson's, and his wit, less biting though li

to moral decisiveness the creative energy of the great fighter. A

to our mind and seems to tarry for an explanation: "The

HER

llege, Oxford (1st Scholarship). Hertford Scholarship, 1907; Second in Honour Moderations, 1908; Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1908; 1st in Litt.

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