Dr. Inge, on the other hand, it is what Christ said that matters,
what He taught that demands our obedience, what He revealed that
commands our love. Christianity for him is not a series of extraordinary
acts, but a voice from heaven. It is not the Christ of tradition before
whom he bows his knee, but the Christ of history, the Christ of faith,
the Christ of experience--the living and therefore the evolving Christ.
And for him, as for the great majority of searching men, the more the
mists of pious _aberglaube_ lift, the more real, the more fair, and the
more divine becomes the Face of that living Christ, the more close the
sense of His companionship.

A friend of mine once asked him, "Are you a Christian or a
Neoplatonist?" He smiled. "It would be difficult to say," he replied.
He was thinking, I am sure, of Troeltsch's significant prophecy, and
warning, that _the Future of Christian philosophy depends on the renewal
of its alliance with Neoplatonism_.

Let no man suppose that the intellectual virtues are outside the range
of religion. "Candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous
accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested
collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly
renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and
strengthening solitude; these, and many other cognate qualities," says
Baron von Huegel, "bear upon them the impress of God and His Christ."
What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own
character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the man, _who never
shirks a difficulty or writes an insincere word_."

But though he is associated in the popular mind chiefly with modernism,
Dr. Inge is not by any means only a controversial theologian. Above and
beyond everything else, he is a mystic. You may find indications of this
truth even in a book like _Outspoken Essays_, but they are more numerous
in his two little volumes, _The Church and the Age_ and _Speculum
Animae_, and of course more numerous still in his great work on
Plotinus[5]. He is far more a mystic than a modernist. Indeed I regard
him as the Erasmus of modernism, one so sure of truth that he would
trust time to work for his ideas, would avoid fighting altogether, but
certainly all fighting that is in the least degree premature. The two
thousand years of Christianity, he says somewhere, are no long period
when we remind ourselves that God sp