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.

I have spoken to him about psychical research and the modern interest in spiritualism.  “I don’t think much of that!” he replied.  Then, in a lower key, “It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality.”  How did they reach that belief?  “By thinking things out, and asking the question, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

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.”