With his enthusiasm for education goes a perfervid spiritual conviction that intellect is not enough.  He tells the story of an old Scots woman who listened intently to a highly intellectual sermon by a brilliant scholar, and at the end of it called out from her seat, “Aye, aye; but yon rope o’ yours is nae lang enough tae reach the likes o’ me.”  Something much more mysterious and much more powerful than intellect is necessary to change the heart of humanity; but when love and knowledge go hand in hand there you get both the great teacher and the good shepherd.  Knowledge without love is almost as useless to a teacher as love without knowledge.

In his study at Mansfield, a large and friendly room book-lined from floor to ceiling, with a pleasant hearth at one end of it, where he smokes an occasional pipe with an interrupting fellow scholar, but where he is most often to be found buried in a great book and oblivious of all else besides, this little man with the darting eyes and soft voice is now invading, with sound good sense to save him from nausea or contamination, the region of morbid psychology.

He would perfectly agree with Dr. Inge’s characteristic statement, “The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed”; but he is, I think, much more aware of the power and extent of this suggestion than is the Dean of St. Paul’s, and therefore qualifies himself to meet the psychologists on their own ground.

He has confessed to me that in reading Freud he had to wade through much almost unimaginable filth, and he is driven to think that Freud himself is the victim of “a sex complex,” a man so obsessed by a single theory, so ridden by one idea, that he perfectly illustrates the witty definition of an expert—­“an expert is one who knows nothing else.”  All the same, Dr. Selbie assures me that his studies have been well worth while, that modern psychology has much to teach us of the highest value, and that religion as well as medicine will more and more have to take account of this daring science which advances so swiftly into their own provinces.

So far as my experience goes no man of the first rank in Anglican circles is preparing himself for this inevitable encounter with anything like the thoroughness of Dr. Selbie, a nonconformist.

He makes it a rule never to interfere with the troubles of another communion; but I do not think I misrepresent him when I say that he regrets the immersion of the Church of England in questions of theological disputation at a time when the true battle of religion is shifting on to quite other ground.

Not many people in Anglo-Catholic circles realise perhaps that to the educated nonconformist all this excitement about modernism seems strangely old-fashioned.  Long ago such matters were settled.  The scholar nonconformist is no longer concerned with dogmatic difficulties; he has abandoned with the old teleology the old pagan theology, and now, believing in an immanent teleology, in an evolution that is creative and that has direction, believing also that Christ is the incarnation of God’s purpose and the revelation of His character, he is pressing forward not to meet the difficulties of to-morrow, but to equip himself for meeting those difficulties when they arise with real intelligence and genuine power.