THE END OF THE AGE

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 28, 28 October 1919, Page 5

THE END OF THE AGE

DEAN INGE IN A GLOOMY MOOD. Preaching- at the annual service of the Churchmen's Union at St. Mary Abbolt's, Kensington, recently, Dean Inge saiid that in live years of war the world wis poorer by the loss of eight-Million young and vigorous men. Wealth and credit had teen destroyed to an extent which we stiK failed to realise. "We aro leaving to our children," he said, "the inheritance of a bankrupt. Besides tliiti material lots we have to lament the abolition of all honourable conventions and human restrictions which regulated the intercourse of nations in war as well as in peace. The international law has, for the time being, ceased to exist. We have aoso lost our cherished delusion?, our balief in progress and our hope that civilised man was less cruel and treacherous than the savage. "We have lost for the time being ail examples of one of the great types of Government and strong monarchy. Democracy is everywhere threatened by anarchism operating through strikes, it is haidly possible to paint the prospects of civilisation in too dark a. colour, .in my opinion the ago of industrialism, which began about 150 yenrs ago, nas received its death wound. If it goes the gyoat <y-ties it lias dotted over j'hirope will hove to go too, and we cannot guess what wi.'l become of our inhabitants." The war hid given a stimnlous to superstition, added the Dean. They beard of superstitious fantasies in the trenches, and at home there had been a recrudescence of necromancy which had been marked in the so-called leisured classes, but he thought, that was only a trausl- • tory phase, and lie stav no reason why the real Christianity should lose any of its hold on the nation in consequence of the war. They had been brought into contact with facts at their very, hardest; they had seen tho idol of the market place shattered, and had had an object lerson in what unabashed secularism and materialism led to. The conditions were, favourable for a creat religious revival in which literal Churchmen would have an [important part to play. Ar. tho pres?nt time there were nundredg of Nonconformist min>:?le.rs who wero seeking to nntor the Ministry of fho Church of England, although they w<;ro discouraged rather than encouraged by the bishops. Their main wish was to bolr-ne to a. free cluitp.li, and it was the establishment and the comparative independence enjoyed by .Anglican incumbent'- which attracted them. "Want of oliarnefir even jnoro than want of intelligence." said Dean Inge, "is flic reason v.hv at'l schemes of human Government refuse to work. Any man living ciii voluntary noverty does more to recommend ' Christianity than twenty comfortable rhetoricians who wax eloquent about the iniouities of the rich and thi? rights of the noor. AVe all "imlif to make it a principle to live more simply than.we ii.to obliged to live, and make our protest against nil luxury, idleness, <fiiokness in production, dishonesty, ami uwlpss work."