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.”

But we are to love God with all our mind, as well as with all our heart.

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.

His main protest is against the rule of the ignorant, the democratic principle applied to the amor intellectualis Dei.  Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, all must accept, with humility, the teaching of the Master.  Plotinus, he points out, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ.  The greatest of us has to learn.  He who would teach should be a learner all his life.

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.