Einstein can shake his faith in these absolutes. His Spirit of the
Universe is absolute truth, absolute goodness, absolute beauty. He is a
Neoplatonist, but something more. He ascends into communion with this
Universal Spirit whispering the Name of Christ, and by the power of
Christ in his soul addresses the Absolute as Abba, Father.

No man is freer from bigotry or intolerance, though not many can hate
falsity and lies more earnestly. The Church of England, he tells me,
should be a national church, a church expressing the highest reach of
English temperament, with room for all shades of thought. He quotes
Dollinger, "No church is so national, so deeply rooted in popular
affection, so bound up with the institutions and manners of the country,
or so powerful in its influences on national character." But this was
written in 1872. Dr. Inge says now, "The English Church represents, on
the religious side, the convictions, tastes, and prejudices of the
English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character. . . . A love of
order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a
middle path between what a seventeenth century divine called 'the
meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid slutterny
of fanatic conventicles.'"

Uniformity, he tells me, is not to be desired. One of our greatest
mistakes was letting the Wesleyan Methodists go; they should have been
accommodated within the fold. Another fatal mistake was made by the
Lambeth Conference, in its insistence on re-ordination. Imagine the
Church of England, with two Scotch Archbishops at its head, thinking
that the Presbyterians would consent to so humiliating a condition! An
interchange of pulpits is desirable; it might increase our intelligence,
or at least it should widen our sympathy. He holds a high opinion of the
Quakers. "Practical mystics: perhaps they are the best Christians, I
mean the best of them."

Modernism, he defines, at its simplest, as personal experience, in
contradistinction from authority. The modernist is one whose knowledge
of Christ is so personal and direct that it does not depend on miracle
or any accident of His earthly life. Rome, he thinks, is a falling
power, but she may get back some of her strength in any great industrial
calamity--a revolution, for example. Someone once asked him which he
would choose, a Black tyranny, or a Red? He replied "On the whole, I
think a Black." The friend corrected him. "You ar