Dean of the Depths

The Very Reverend William Ralph Inge,* Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, accompanied by Mrs. Inge, arrived at the Port of New York, a second-class passenger on the Cunarder Mauretania.

"Tall--rigid--lean--gray of face--heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness--stonelike--impassive--like a figure from the pages of Dostoievsky--like a poor Russian nobleman," so the newspapermen found him, the greatest living Platonist, the world's most provoking mystic. The newsmen plied him with their trademarked questions. He was polite.

"Are you the ecclesiastical crepe-hanger of England?" "I neither affirm nor deny."

"Do you like colloquial translations of the Bible?" "I can't say I like the specimens I have seen."

"Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?" "I should not say that the belief is a vital part of faith. ... It is a historical question which must be judged on historical evidence."

"What about sex drama?" "Being hard of hearing,/- I do not go to them."

"Do you go to the movies ?" He said he took his children, but Mrs. Inge interposed: "You never went but once." Said he: "My wife says only once."

"Are the flappers of today any worse than their grandmothers?" "I don't know their grandmothers."

The Dean proceeded to New Haven, began the Lyman Beecher Lectures to the Yale Divinity School. Dr. Harry E. Fosdick was last year's Beecher lecturer.

Characteristic utterances: "Democracy means a victory of sentiment over reason." "Democracy is likely to perish." "The Church has lived by its monopolies and conquered by its intolerance." "There is only one thing against Catholicism--it is an imposture ; and there is only one thing in its favor--it works."

But it was only a year ago, after the death of a little daughter, that people began to understand the mystic whose "life is hid with Christ in God." Sorrow drove him to write out the heart of his religion in a book of devotion: "Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts. Hope thou in God!"

*If you his temper would unhinge,

And his most sacred rights infringe,

Or, excommunicated, singe

Where fiends forever writhe and cringe

Imploring that a drop of ginge-

R ale may on their tongues impinge

Address him then as Doctor Inje;

But if you prize the proper thing

Be sure you call him Doctor Ing.

(Unless, your ignorance to screen

You temporise with Mister Dean)

But be advised by me, and cling

To the example of the King

And fearlessly pronounce him Ing.

Then rush to hear him have his fling

In Pauls, and places where they sing.--

From the works of George Bernard Shaw

/-Said Charles F.G. Masterman of him: "Music is not only a negation but a torture, and he once confessed to me that the long choral services of St. Paul's were a physical misery to him, sometimes becoming almost unendurable."