THE NEW DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1111, 26 April 1911, Page 6

THE NEW DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S

The appointment of De. W. R, Inge, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, toithe Deanery of St. Paul's, as announced in our cable columns to-day, will be read with great interest by Anglican Churchmen and many others throughout the English-speaking world who are acquainted with the literary work of this distinguished scholar. The Deanery of St. Paul's is one of the most honoured positions in the. Church, and in Dr. Inge a worthy successor of Mansel, Milmax, Church, and Gregory has been found. Professor Inge is one of the ablest leaders of modern thought in the Church of England at the present time. He had a brilliant University career at Cambridge, and. as the Guardian recently stated, ho ,: has captured the imagination of tho scholastic world." He is a decidedly Broad Churchman_ and a very independent philosophical thinker. He holds advanced views on Biblical criticism, though he has not specialised to any'great extent in this

branch of learning; but he has been a keen critic of certain aspects of modernism, the acceptance of which, ho thinks, would weaken the historical basis of the Christian faith. He has also raised his voice in warning against the new philosophical doctrine of Pragmatism and kindred attacks on the intellectual side of human nature which tend to belittle the authority of the logical process. In a recent book entitled Faith and Psychology, Dr. Inge states that "if the world is 'wild, , as Professor James thinks, we ought to give up thinking, for connected thought about a disconnected world must bo false" ; but, ho adds, "modern thought can never commit suicide in this fashion." Dr. Inge finds much to commend in the writings of the German philosopher Eucken, who contends that the spiritual life is an independent life on a higher plane than the natural. In a recent address at Cambridge he referred to the popularity of sceptical opportunism in current philosophy which declares man and his practical needs to be the measure of all things, and remarked that "such a renunciation of man's highest privilege—the right to seek and find God's truth as it is, objectively and eternally—could only be the result of a profound disillusionment and disappointment. Such periods of depression in philosophy have been known before; they never last long. Men arc never long content to 'give up' the riddle of existence. Human needs may, as the Pragmatists toll us, be the dynamic of all speculation; but one of the greatest of human needs is to be something more than a Pragmatist." With Dr.. Inge as Dean of St. Paul's the Anglican Church in London will certainly, be strengthened on the intellectual side.