Read Ebook: Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality by Begbie Harold Lake Kirsopp Author Of Introduction Etc Verpilleux Emile Illustrator

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DEAN INGE

When our day is done, and men look back to the, shadows we have left behind us, and there is no longer any spell of personal magnetism to delude right judgment, I think that the figure of Dean Inge may emerge from the dim and too crowded tapestry of our period with something of the force, richness, and abiding strength which gives Dr. Johnson his great place among authentic Englishmen.

His true setting is the Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle 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 adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling Crabbe's memorable lines:

Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene; Presents no objects tender or profound, But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around.

In appearance he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin, with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set and colour of the face stonelike and impassive.

In repose he looks as if he had set himself to stare the Sphinx out of countenance and not yet had lost heart in the matter. When he smiles, it is as if a mischievous boy looked out 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 the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some fashion for which I cannot account, a frozen whimsicality.

Few public men, with perhaps the exception of Samuel Rogers, ever cared so little about appearance. It is believed that the Dean would be indistinguishable from a tramp but for the constant 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 suggested, one of those poor Russian noblemen whom Dostoevsky loved to place in the dismal and sordid atmosphere of a lodging-house, there to shine like golden planets by the force of their ideas.

But when all this is said, and it is worth saying, I hope, if only to make the reader feel that he is here making the acquaintance of an ascetic of the intellect, a man who cares most deeply for accurate thought, and is absorbed body, soul and spirit in the contemplation of eternal values, still, for all the gloom of his surroundings and the deadness of his appearance, it is profoundly untrue to think of the Dean as a prophet of pessimism.

When he speaks to one, in the rather muffled voice of a man troubled by deafness, the impression he makes is by no means an impression of melancholy or despair; on the contrary it is the impression of strength, power, 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 inaccessible, because he lives almost entirely in the spiritual world, seeking Truth with a steady perseverance of mind, Goodness with the full energy of his heart, and Beauty with the deep mystical passion of his soul.

"I do not like being unpleasant," he said to me on one occasion, "but if no one else will, and the time requires it--"

It is a habit with him to leave a sentence unfinished which is sufficiently clear soon after the start.

In what way is he unpleasant? and what are those movements of the time which call in his judgment for unpleasantness?

Of Bergson he said to me, "I hope he is still thinking," and when I questioned him he replied that Bergson's teaching up to this moment "suggests that anything may happen."

Here you may see one of the main movements of our day which call, in the Dean's judgment for unpleasantness--the unpleasantness of telling people not to make fools of themselves. Humanity must not go over in a body to Mr. Micawber.

What is wrong with this generation? It is a generation that refuses to accept the rule and discipline of reason, which thinks it can reach millennium 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 guided by reason, crowds never." It is a generation which lives by catchwords, which plays tricks, which attempts to cut knots, which counts heads.

Some may prefer the softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . . Unfortunately, experience shows 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 nature has no sentiment, he rages like a mad dog and combines with his theoretical objection to capital punishment a lust to murder all who disagree with him.

Beware of sentiment! Beware of it in politics, beware of it in religion. See things as they are. Accept human nature for what it is. Consult history. Judge by reason and experience. Act with courage.

As he faces politics, so he faces religion.

He desires to rescue Christianity from all the sentimental vulgarities which have disfigured it in recent years--alike from the aesthetic extravagances of the ritualist and the organising fussiness 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 science of life, a discipline which fits the Soul for its journey, "by an inner ascent," to the presence of God. Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing.

Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind. It cannot be seen at a glance, understood in a moment, adopted by a gesture. It is a deep and profound philosophy of life. It proposes a transvaluation of values. It insists that the spiritual life is the only true life. It sets the invisible above the visible, and the eternal above the temporal. It tears up by 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 natural ideas; but let him think, let him listen to the voice of God, and let him decide as a rational being. Let him not presume to set up his trivial notions, or to think that he can silence Truth by bawling falsehood at the top of his voice. Let him be humble. Let him listen to the teacher. Let him give all his attention to this great matter, for it concerns his soul.

Here again is the aristocratic principle. The average man, until he has disciplined his reason to understand this great matter, must hold his peace; certainly he must not presume to lay down the law.

When we exclaim against this doctrine, and speak with enthusiasm of the virtues of the poor, Dr. Inge asks us to examine those virtues and to judge of their worth. Among the poor, he quotes, "generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation."

Does he, then, shut out the humble and the poor from the Kingdom of God?

Not for a moment. "Ultimately, we are what we love and care for, and no limit has been set to what we may become without ceasing to be ourselves." The door of love stands open, 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, goodness, and beauty. They must not be encouraged to sentimentalise; they must be bidden to decide. The poor can be debauched as easily as the rich. Many are called, but few chosen.

In everything he says and writes I find this desire to exalt Truth above the fervours of emotionalism and the dangerous drill of the formalist. Always he is calling upon men to drop their prejudices and catchwords, to forsake their conceits and sentiments, to face Truth with a quiet pulse and eyes clear of all passion. Christianity is a tremendous thing; let no man, believer or unbeliever, attempt to make light of it.

It is not compassion for the intellectual difficulties of the average man which has made Dr. Inge a conservative modernist, if so I may call him. Sentiment of no kind 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 intellectual honesty which dreads what Plato calls 'the lie in the soul' even more than the lie on the lips." He is a modernist because he is an intellectual ascetic.

When we compare his position with that of Dr. Gore we see at once the width of the gulf which separates the traditionalist from the philosopher. To Dr. Gore the creeds and the miracles are 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 Heaven is within! Need we wonder that Dr. Gore cries out despairingly for more discipline? He summons reason, it is true, but to defend and explain creeds without which there is no Christianity.

Meanwhile we have our cocksure little guides, some of whom say to us, "That is primitive, therefore it is good," and others, "This is up-to-date, therefore it is better." Not very wise persons any of them, I fear.

And again, writing of Catholic Modernism in France:

We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly 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 speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our worship was a historical figure.

Prayer . . . is "the elevation of the mind and heart to God." It is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we come into immediate contact with the things that cannot be shaken.

Are we to set against such plain testimony the pessimistic agnosticism of a voluptuary like Omar Khayy?m?

May it not be that the door has no key because it has no lock?

The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed.

The life of Christ was throughout a life of prayer. Not only did He love to spend many hours in lonely communing with His Father, on the mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and to choose for this purpose, but His whole life was spent in habitual realisation of God's presence.

Religion is caught rather than taught; it is the religious teacher, not the religious lesson, that helps the pupil to believe.

What we love, that we see; and what we see, that we are.

We need above all things to simplify our religion and our inner life generally.

We want to separate the essential from the nonessential, to concentrate our faith upon the pure God-consciousness, the eternal world which to Christ was so much nearer and more real than the world of external objects.

Christ meant us to be happy, happier than any other people.

It is because he is so profoundly convinced of the mystical truth of Christianity, because he has so honestly tried and so richly 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 sorrowful, that he opposes himself to the obscurantism of the Anglo-Catholic and the emotional economics of the political reformer.

"The Christian cure," he says, "is the only real cure." The socialist is talking in terms of the old currency, the currency of the world's quantitative standards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which demonetises the old. Spiritual goods are unlimited in amount; they are increased by being shared; and we rob nobody by taking them. He believes with Creighton that "Socialism will only be possible when we are all perfect, and then it will not be needed."

In the meantime, "Christianity increases the wealth of the world by creating new values." Only in the currency of Christ can true socialism hope to pay its way.

We miss the heart and centre of his teaching if we forget for a moment that it is his conviction of the sufficiency of Christ's revelation which makes him so deadly 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 mystery of Christ, no compromise of any kind in the world's loyalty to its one Physician. Simplify your dogmas; simplify your theologies. Christ is your one essential.

The answer is characteristic. Dr. Inge has thought things out; everything in his faith has been thought out; and the basis of all his thinking is acceptance of absolute values--absolute truth, absolute goodness, 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 is a Neoplatonist, but something more. He ascends into communion with this Universal Spirit whispering the Name of Christ, and by the power of Christ in his soul addresses the Absolute as Abba, Father.

No man is freer from bigotry or intolerance, though not many can hate falsity and lies more earnestly. The Church of England, he tells me, should be a national church, a church expressing the highest reach of English temperament, with room for all shades of thought. He quotes Dollinger, "No church is so national, 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 the English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character. . . . A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid slutterny of fanatic conventicles.'"

Uniformity, he tells me, is not to be desired. One of our greatest mistakes was letting the Wesleyan Methodists go; they should have been accommodated within the fold. Another fatal mistake was made by the Lambeth Conference, 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 pulpits is desirable; it might increase our intelligence, or at least it should widen our sympathy. He holds a high opinion of the Quakers. "Practical mystics: perhaps they are the best Christians, I mean the best of them."

Modernism, he defines, at its simplest, as personal experience, in contradistinction from authority. The modernist is one whose knowledge of Christ is so personal and direct that it does not depend on miracle or any accident 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 tyranny, or a Red? He replied "On the whole, I think a Black." The friend corrected him. "You are wrong. Men would soon emerge from the ruins of a Red tyranny, but Rome never lets go her power till it is torn from her."

"A profound reconstruction is demanded," he says, "and for those who have eyes to see has been already for some time in progress. The new type of Christianity will be more Christian than the old, because it will be more moral. A number of unworthy beliefs about God are being tacitly dropped, and they are so treated because they are unworthy of Him."

He sees the future of Christianity as a deep moral and spiritual power in the hearts and minds of men who have at length learned the value of the new currency, and have exchanged profession for experience.

But this Erasmus, far more learned than the other, and with a courage which far exceeds the other's, and with an impatience of nature, an irritability of mind, which the other seldom knew, is 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 made up his mind whether "Art is a Crime or only an Absurdity," whether Clergymen ought to be multiplied or exterminated, whether in general we are getting on, and if so where we are going to.

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