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.
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