PROTESTANT DECAY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19330, 3 November 1932, Page 4

PROTESTANT DECAY

DEAN INGE ON ROME. Dr W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, was the first speaker at the Conference of Modern Churchmen at Bristol. Referring to the ceremony celebration of the Oxford Movement to be held next year, he described it as a dexterous move on the part of the Anglo-Catholics, and said it was causing some embarrassment both to Evangelicals and Liberals. They were both willing to do what they could to promote unity in the National Church, but the main tendency of the Oxford Movement had been all along in a direction which, as Liberal Churchmen, they could not entirely approve. The movement in its present form was universally regarded as an attempt to go back upon the Reformation settlement. The fear, continued the Dean, that the foundations of Protestantism were thoroughly insecure was driving many into the arms of a church which claimed to be infallible. They were often asked: “What exactly do you stand for?” Many people, there was reason to think, left the Church because they could not get a satisfactory answer to that question. The attractiveness of Catholicism was very complex. A strong weapon in her armoury was that a Catholic did not think r argue—he knew. It was now the fashion for popular men of letters —none, perhaps, quite in the first rank—to become Romanists. He supposed they might enumerate ten at least who done so. It was useless to speculate on their motives since they had given no intelligent account of their “conversion." but he fancied they had persuaded themselves that if an educated man wanted a religion it could only be Catholicism. At any rate, a contempt and hatred for other churches was very easily acquired by these apostates. It was significant, continued the Dean, that while Catholicism had gained in prestige and even in number in Protestant countries, within its own domain it had been losing hearly. He was not suggesting that they ought to rejoice in the misfortunes of the Roman Church, which were not caused by any growth of Protestantism in those countries. “I only suggest,” he said, “that the power of Roman institutionalism is declining, not increasing, in spite of the arrogant tones which its representatives use in England.” The revolutionary movement which aimed at uprooting all the cultural traditions of the past were more hostile to Catholicism than to Protestantism. He contended that if the scientific spirit continued to dominate our civilisation it was almost inconceivable that Catholicism would regain its power and influence. Protestantism might decay, but it would not be killqd by the attack of that interesting and splendid anachronism, the Litin Church.