“THE GLOOMY DEAN.”

Shannon News, 12 June 1925, Page 4

“THE GLOOMY DEAN.”

CHARACTER SKETCH BY “A.G.G. ’ In the series .of articles ‘Men and Women of To-day’ which “A.G.G.” (Mr A. G. Gardiner) is writing for the ‘Daily News,’ this noted journalist gives a searching analysis of the work and views of Dean Inge. After stating that “Life Avithout Dean Inge would be like lamb without mint sauce,” he goes on to observe: When you agree Avith him he goes down like milk, and Avhen you disagree with him the ginger is gloriously hot in the mouth. His insults have flavour that makes you lap them up with gusto, and before you have time to be angry Avith him for his savage assaults on your pet enthusiasms you have forgiven him for some swashing blow that he has struck at your pet 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 alike he has the quality of loneliness and abstraction. He enters the pulpit and reads his sermon as if he Avere unaware of his surroundings and of the rattle of. his own shrapnel; he sits at the table as if he, too, had shot the albatross and was hag-ridden by the terrific memory; he Avalks the street like a man in a dream, twitching with the agonies of his own nightmare. His face is long, pallid, and sorrow-

l'uI; liia mouth thin-lipped and whimsical; his eye fixed, lack-lustre, and melancholy. A rare, wistful smile plays across his features, but it flees incontinently, like a ghost that has heard the cock crow. He is deaf, but I think it is the deafness of the mind rather than the sense, for I have noticed that in conversation he hears very well what he wants to hear. He does not suffer fools gladly, and, like Reynolds—

When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff. Tn religion he passes for a mystic, but his mind is as hard as steel and as bright, his tongue as sharp and biting as the east wind. His genius for coritroversy is only matched by that of Mr. Bernard Shaw, with whom he has much in common, in spite of the wide disparity in their views and professions. In spite of the violence of his feelings in regard to democracy, he is no commonplace reactionary. If he belives in an aristocracy it is an aristocracy of blue blood, which, if it not revitalised by pleteian but eugenic marriage, is stale blood. He 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 depend 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 courageous speech. He loathes the garb that his

calling imposes on him, but he never trotted about in khaki as so many of 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 his was one of the few voices that urged wis-

’ dom. 'We were all stark mad to- ■ gether,” he said, in a sermon in St. ‘ Paul’s. “There is no abstract demon called Germany. . . . We cannot af--1 ford to have a humiliated embittered degenerate Germany any more than a triumphant, militant Germany.” His fellow-clerics fell on him in ‘The Times’ as though he- hdd impeached the doctrine of the Trinity, but he stood his ground against these "fatuous and insolent ” attacks. And though he may refer to that “greasy instrument of party politics, the Nonconformist conscience,” he is innocent of the vice of sectarianism, has no repect for ecclesiastical millinery, and likes to point out the similarity between St. Augustine and a good Quaker. But, though free from theological partisanship, his sense of realities rejects reunion with Borne as 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 to deal with the constructive thinker behind the destructive critic. Yet it is as a Christian philosopher that Dean Inge must ultimately be judged. In | this sphere he pursues as individual and fearless a line as he does in public affairs. Into the company of timid clerics, nursing officially a pre-Coper-nican vision of the universe, and seeing the ground of faith visibly slipping from beneath them, he comes forward with a restatement of Christianity which cuts across all the schools. It leaves the historicity of the miracles to science, and rejects ,the verbal inpiration of the Scriptures—-“ Our Lord is 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 saint or a humbug to preach the Gospel in these days in a pure and unalloyed form.” He finds no substitute

lor supernaturalism in the Nature Avorship of Wordsworth, for Nature only echoes back the mood of the spirit;nor in pantheism, which leaves the Avorld as we find it; nor in the revolt against intellectualism, which lakes refuge in ghosts, faith-healing, and Christian Science. Religion is the search after the nature of God, and Christianity is a standard of values and a Avay. of life.. The philosophy of Greece is as vital to this conception .as the Incarnation, and Neoplatonism furnishes Christianity Avitli its theology, its metaphysics, and its mysticism.

In this realm of speculation I leave him. Whether w e agree with him or whether we differ from him, we cannot bo indifferent to him. He compels us to think. He bursts into the spiritual stagnation and hedonism of to-day Avith defiant questionings—

Why? What? Whence? Whither? He lashes us across the face with his whip. He calls us ugly names. But there is a flame in him, and he does not measure life by the things that perish. He in his way has as clear a vision of th e city of destruction as “the God-intoxicated” Calvinist of the seventeenth century had, and if the journey to Beulah is not so plain to him as it was to Christian, he is, at least, desperately seeking to find it.