DEAN INGE

Evening Star, Issue 21751, 20 June 1934, Page 9

DEAN INGE

RETIRING FROM ST. PAUL'S SUCCESSOR APPOINTED Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright. LONDON, June 19. The Very Rev. Walter Robert Matthews, Dean of Exeter, has been appointed to succeed Dean Inge as Dean of St. Paul’s. DEAN INGE. William Ralph Inge, the well-known preacher and publicist, was born in June, 1860, at Crayke, Yorkshire, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and entered the church. After holding an assistant-mastership at Eton from 1884 to 1888 he was appointed a

Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. From 1905 to 1907 lie was vicar of All Saints’, Ennismore Gardens, London, and from 1907 to 1911 Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. A gifted scholar, he has delivered several courses of university lectures in Britain and in the United States. Since 1911 ho has been Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, where he has made a name for himself as one of the foremost preachers in England, not merely because of his fine style and delivery, but on account of his original, striking, and outspoken views, which excite the interest both of sympathiser and opponents, and are much reported in the Press. His attacks on “grandmotherly legislation,” the canonisation of democracy, and on Socialism and the Labour Party, as well as his bold contention during the war that Germany was one of the best governed countries, have caused him to be regarded in some quarters as reactionary. He is, however, an enemy of all extremists on either side. A_ “ good European,” ho is against anything that appears to him to stand in the way of the restoration of reasonable and peaceful relations between the nations, and he holds that an embittered, downtrodden, and impoverished Germany is as little to be desired as a triumphant, militarist Germany. The dean’s pessimistic utterances and caustic criticisms of the tendencies of modern life have earned for him the nickname of “ The Gloomy Dean.” Characteristic was his Christmas sermon in 1925 ; in which, after seeing a “ gleam of light in the Locarno Pact,” he declared that the coming danger to the British nation was from within, the control of its destinies having passed to the class of organised Labour which seemed to him to bo “ not the most fully educated in those moral qualities which make a nation great and united and happy.”DEAN MATTHEWS. The Very llcv. Walter Robert Matthews, M.A., D.D., has been Dean of Exeter since 1932. He is a fellow of King’s College, London, and a member of the Senate of London University. After serving in various cures he was appointed Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at King’s College in 1918, a position he held till 1932, when he was appointed Dean of Exeter. _ Ho is fiftythree years of age, and is author of numerous books on theological and philosophical subjects.