THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT "THE need of the age
is to restore the idea of the Church of the Spirit." There is no doubt of the need : the gestures of amity and a would-be comprehension of each others' ideals and policies made by differing religious bodies indicate that Christian unity is realised not only as an exquisite dream of perfection but as an imperative necessity, if the Christian Faith is to fulfil its world-wide mission. No-one, we think, has shown a more sharply-defined consciousness of the evils of a divided front in the battle for a faith at once spiritual, intellectual, and practical, its passing habitat on earth, its citizenship in heaven, than the Dean of St. Paul's. His little volume of Hulsean Lectures, repeating, as they do, much of his former teaching, are none the less welcome ; we cannot have too much and too weighty reiteration of the guidance which he unswervingly presses upon us, that in the pursuit of Goodness, Beauty and Truth we are on the very tracks of God.
Dr. Inge's insistent message is clear in the very title of his book. That his own quest has its limitations and its prefer- ences he would be the first to acknowledge. Despite several generous tributes to the peculiar genius of the Roman Church, " the Roman Church is in no danger while the Catholic saint continues to be held in honour," as he says in one place ; his aversion from institutionalism rather blinds him to the special gift to the race which it has been that Church's province to bestow. The " law-abiding " instinct, fading now, we fear, from the mind of the English race which once made it its boast, and fading most in the sphere of religion, owes much to that conscious power of rule which Hobbes thought the Catholic Church inherited from the Empire, on whose grave the Church sat, " a crowned ghost," but which, with all debasements into Casaro-papism, was the salvation of mediaeval Europe from anarchy. " The history of a Church ought to be a biography of ideals," says the Dean, and he finishes with an echo of Henry More's verdict, " The Quakers, of all Christian bodies, have remained nearest to the teaching and example of Christ."
But the pith and marrow of these Lectures lies between these obiter dicta. " No-one has shown as clearly as Jesus of Nazareth what the radiance of the Will of God may be in practical life," but " no-one, on the other hand, has placed the religious idea before the human understanding more lucidly, more magnetically, than has Plato." These are not Dr. Inge's words ; but we think he would endorse their implication. Christ appeals to the heart and conscience ; Plato to the intellect. It has always seemed to us one of the sorrows of the Gospel that Christ in His human life exper- ienced, so far as we know, no contact with minds above a second or third-rate order. And Plotinus mysteriously ignored Him. Yet Christ and Plotinus did finally meet, partially in Augustine, who passed through the Neo-Platonic experience, fully in E4ena, who introduced pseudo- Dionysius to the West, and, once again, by a singularly gracious mediation, in the teaching of the Cambridge Plato- nists. To their influence Dr. Inge does full justice, as might be expected and then goes on to emphasize the later debt which this country owed, throughout the nineteenth century, to the laymen and particularly the poets who kept burning and handed down the torch of the Platonic tradition. We are grateful for this emphasis. Historically, it is one of the most marked features of post-Reformation religion in England that the mystical life, in its proper sense and not in its aber- rations, found again and again inspiration and relucence from the poets. Rather to them than to the theologians came " new outpourings of the Spirit." The self-discipline and the unifying of Nature in Wordsworth, the sudden, authentic gleams of a world that is not ours in Tennyson, the tremendous quest of Beauty in Rossetti, the love-surrender of the soul to God in Patmore—the spiritual exaltation of Miss Underhill's verse—these are guides upon our path, and for those who are not attuned to the " severe moral discipline " of poetry, there is the equally " forceful teaching " of Ruskin and Carlyle, of Sidgwick and Caird, of von Hugel and Clutton Brock.
These and other lay prophets, named and unnamed by Dean Inge, have had one real message to urge upon their age, the claims of " the unescapable Christ," as Dr. Bowie strikingly names Him in an arresting book. His inclusiveness, His formidableness—such qualities are urged upon us, and they carry the mind back to the Johannine theme of a Christ who, as promised, is vaster far in claim and in influence than the human Jesus. He energizes, He interprets anew and on a wider scale for each successive age. And we realize that the Lord thus defined is that indwelling Spirit, whose are " the greater works," the guidance into all truth, the liberty, that is yet law, of the sons of God. Here, precisely, we suppose, lies the link between mysticism and modernism, and the Dean of St. Paul's, without exactly enrolling himelf in either camp, has often shewn his sympathy with the watchwords of both. It is a curious paradox that both Erastianism—though that is not under discussion,—and modernism have certain affinities with mysticism, and are not uncomfortable in its company. Erastianism, like true mysticism, lays stress on law and logic, and at any rate owns that the Divine guidance may be revealed through other media than ecclesiasticism. Modernism, in its insistence on what may be regarded as historically valid in the accounts of the life of Jesus, and the necessary limitations of that historical city, releases for the mystical apprehension—and some modernists are mystics if others are not—the concept of the comsic Christ, the eternal Word, the indwelling Spirit, whose earliest prophets were the Pauline letters and the Johannine documents. Often checked, sometimes well- nigh submerged, but always bearing within itself the certainty of a renaissance, a new Pentecost, that concept, that vision has proved the very life of the Christian Faith. " Soul by soul, and silently, its shining bounds increase ; " it reckons many strange, alien, or unwilling adherents, but its tradition has never really wavered, and the believer in that tradition, however he may express his convictions and with whatever reservations, "believes," in the words of Dr. Shailer Matthews," in the mystery as well as the reality of the present continued life of Christ."
" Heaven," said Whichcote, " is first a temper, then a place," and again, " No sooner hath the truth of God come into the soul's sight, but the soul knows her to be her first and old acquaintance." Such sayings explain the Bishop of Birmingham's statement in a sermon amongst those by various preachers on Ascension and Whitsuntide that the first Pentecostal outpouring was miraculous in the sense under which Tennyson wrote of " that main miracle " of self-identity, and the further miracle that the self does experience first-hand intuitions, influences, call them what we will, from a world of Spirit incapable of scientific proof, but very traceable in its momentous pressure on the highest powers of the human will and reason. If we were asked what share that old-time force, the pulpit, has had in opening the avenues of spiritual power to the receptive mind, we should say, much in the past, witness the labours of a Newman, a Liddon, a Robertson, a Spurgeon, but less, far less, in more recent times. The volume before us in part explains why. The Church has of late thought brevity its wisdom, and has banned emotion along with emotionalism. But the true touch of spirit on spirit is never mistaken, and if the poet and the reformer are at times content to " give themselves away," why not the preacher ?
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