Religion: The Gloomy Dean

During 23 years as Dean of London’s St. Paul’s, Dr. William Ralph Inge (rhymes with sing) had blazed away at many a plump and unsuspecting target. His massive pulpit barrages against smug optimism earned him the nickname of “the Gloomy Dean,” and his 31 books won him a reputation as “the most formidable literary dean since Swift.” Last week, 16 years and eight books after his retirement, it was evident that 90-year-old Dean Inge had not yet run out of ammunition. In Cambridge for a meeting of Britain’s Modern Churchman’s Conference, the Gloomy Dean loaded up again and started firing in all directions.

Baptized Stoicism. The Protestants, he snapped, had little to feel satisfied about. “Calvinism is a fine, manly creed; it is simply baptized stoicism. But as it worships a God who is neither just nor merciful, we can hardly call it Christian.” Take Martin Luther: “My detestation of that man grows. This spiritual father of Adolf Hitler says that the state can do no wrong. ‘It is God that hangs and beheads men and breaks them on the wheel.’ Has any doctrine caused more human misery than this?”

As for Roman Catholicism, said the dean, it “is a very successful method of mind cure . . . But with its arrogant exclusiveness and the submission of the intellect to authority, this totalitarian religion, formidable as it is, can never win the sympathy of any liberal.”

The Red Flag. Getting down to his own Church of England, Inge complained: “Our services are terribly clogged with Judaism. If you are a clergyman, do you not hate having to read many of the Old Testament lessons?

“Do we really expect the workingman to come to church to sing ‘I will think upon Rahab and Babylon’ … or such gibberish as the verse of the 68th Psalm beginning, ‘Rebuke the company of the spearmen’? I am told that the correct translation of these words is ‘Rebuke the hippopotamus.’* Our churchgoers would sing this with equal unction if they had it before them, as fashionable ladies cheerfully sing the Magnificat, which is more violent than The Red Flag.”†

Gloomy Dean Inge found only one thing to be thankful for: “That the hideous hellfire theology is heard no longer in our churches.” Today, he said, clergymen are ashamed to use such appeals as did colonial New England’s Jonathan Edwards, who warned: “You cannot stand before an infuriated tiger. What will you do when God rushes upon you in His wrath?”

Christianity, said the dean, is a way of living, not a way of talking, or even of thinking. “Although Christ was strict in dealing with the temptations of the flesh, He was gentler with such sinners than Puritanism. The ideal Christian is not the monk or hermit, nor is he, as was sometimes thought in the 19th Century, the respectable man.”

*Literally, “the wild beast of the reeds”—the symbol of Egypt. In the original Hebrew the word for wild beast may also mean company; the word for reed may mean spear.

†Excerpt: He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.