ic
coolies than among his European comrades: and as we are to allow the
Broadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy
as anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless
Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; and
it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and
prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as
possible for it.

But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and
traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which
he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of
years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge
admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced
the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious
deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen
Chinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he
ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the
English to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties
of paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve;
his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all
sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the
most Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.

In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism
and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a
certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;
nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the
special defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that
all men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the
formula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there
were but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest
of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to
God night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly
works with, a creed which postulates a hum