DEAN INGE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4834, 25 May 1925, Page 3

DEAN INGE.

HIS WORK AND VIEWS.

FAMOUS JOURNALIST’S ANALYSIS.

In the series of articles, "Men ar.'.i Women of To-day,” which * A.G.G.” is writing for the “Daily News,” thus well-known journalist gives a searching analysis of the work and views of Dean Inge. After stating that “Life without Dean Inge would be like lamb without mint sauce,” he goes on to observe :—

"When you agree with him he goes down like milk, and when you disagree with him the ginger is gloriously hot in the mouth. His insults have a flavour that makes you lau them up with gusto, and before you have time to be angry with him for his savage assaults on your pet enthusiasms yon have forgiven him for some swashing blow that he has -struck at your pe. aversion. He is like a man who talks in his sleep, or like a visitor from some remote planet or some Lazarus from the grave. "In thought and appearance aline he has the quality of loneliness am! abstraction. He enters the pulpit and reads his sermon as if he were' unaware of his surroundings, and of the rattle of his own shrapnel; he site at the table as if he. too, had shot the albatross and .was hag-ridden by the terrific memory ; he walks the street like a man in a dream, twitching with the agonies of his' own nightmare. “iHs face is long, pallid, and sorrowful ; his mouth thin-lipped and whimsical; his eye fixed, lacking lustre, and melancholy. A rare, wistful smile plays across hte features, but it flee-s incontinently like a ghost that has heard the cock crow. He is deaf, but 1 think it is the deafness of the mind rather than the i-ense, for 1 have noticed that in conversation lie hears very well what he wants to hear. He does not suffer fools gladly, and, like Reynold' : ‘When they tallied of their Raphaels, Correggios, and istuff, he shifted his trumpet an 1 only took snuff.’ “In religion he passes ofr a mystic, but his mind is hard as steel and a’> bright, and his tongue as , harp an 1 biting as the east wind. His genius tor controversy is only matched t-v that of Mr'Bernard Shaw, with whom he has much in common, in spite cf the wide disparity hi their views and profession’s.”

“A.GG./ then quotes with telling effect the views of Dean Inge on life, democracy, trade unions, Socialism, etc., and then sums up trenchantly as follows :—

"In spite of the violence ->f his feelings in regard to democracy he is > r commonplace reactionary. If he Believes in aristocracy it is aw aristocracy of the intellect and of high living. not of blue blood, which, if it is not revitalised by plebeian but eugenic marriage, is stale Mobil. IT: is as scornful of Imperialism as he is of Socialism, is a good European, and never talks the cant of patriotism. The greatness of his country is not a material thing, and does not depen.; on painting the map red. It is a moral and spiritual thing, that has been our noblest contribution to the world. During the war he kept his sanity as few of his order did. challenging the passions of the time with rouragebns •speech. He loathes the garb that ni? calling imposes on hini, but he never trotted about in khaki as so many or’ his episcopal brethren did, and I think that nothing on earth would have induced him to stoop to such folly. “And when the war was over he was •one of the few voices that urged wisdom. ’We were all stark mad t'--gethci,’ he said, in a sermon in St. Raul’s. . . . ‘There is no abstract demon called Germany. . . . We can not afford to have a humiliated, em bil'.ered, degenerate Germany anv more than a triumphant, militant Germany.’ His fellow-clerics fell on him in the ‘Times’ as though he ha l impeached the doctrine of tire Trinity, but he stood hits ground against these •fatuous and insolent’ attacks. And, though he may refer to that ‘greasy instrument of party nolitics, the Nonconformist conscience, he ;s innocent of the vice of sectarianism, has no respect for ecclesiastical millinery and likes to point out the similarity between St. Augustine and a good Quaker. But though free from theological partisanship, his se ise of realities rejects reunion with Rome t s a dream. ‘Rome would accept no terms short of submission, and Englishmen are no more likely to pay homage to an Italian priest than they are to pay taxes to an Italian King. “I have left myself little space I" deal with the constructive thinker be hind the destructive critic. Yet it is as a Christian philosopher that Dean Inge must ultimately be judged. In this sphere he pursues ats individual and fearless a line as he docs in public affairs. Into the company of tinY.d clerics, nursing officially a pre-Coper-nicah vision of the universe, and seeing the ground of faith visibly slipping from beneath them, he comes forward with a re-statement of Christianity which cuts across all the schools. It leaves the historicity ot the miracles to science, and rejects the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures —‘Our Lord fe recorded in the Gospels to have made predictions which have not been, and cannot be fulfilled’, (e.g., the imminent Second Coming). He does not believe they were made. ‘A man must be a sain, or a humbug to preach the Gospel in these days in a pure and unalloyed form.’ He finds no substitute to. supematuralism in the nature woish.ip of Wordsworth, for nature only echoes back the mood of the spirit, nor in panthesism, which leaves the world as we find it; or in the revolt against intellectuaUsm winch takes refuge ghosts, faith healing, and Christian Science. Religion is the search after the nature of God, and Christianity is a standard of values and a way of life. The philosophy ot Greece is as vital to this conception as the Incarnation, and Nmplantonisra furnishes Christianity with its theology, its metaphysics, and itp mysticism "In this realm of speculation I

| leave nim. Whether we agree wLn

him or whether we differ i\ om him we cannot be indifferent to him. He compels us to think. He bursts into llu' spiritual .stagnation and hidonism of io-iiay with defiant questionings— Why ? What ? Whence ? Whither ? He lashes us across the face with Ins whip. He calls us ugly names. But there is a flame in him, and he doe>s nut measure life by the tilings chat perish He, in his way, has as clear a vision of the City of Destruction as ‘the God-intoxicated’ Calvinist of the seventeenth century had, and if th? journey to Beulah is not so plain to him as it was to Christian, he is, at least, desperately seeking to find it.”