Rome, Geneva, Science

"I will make a clean breast of it. Why should I not?" said Dean Inge in the first of his Yale lectures delivered last week. He was speaking of preachers who, if they get applause, are as happy as if they had obtained a kingdom.

"I am delighted and then, when I go home, and I reflect that the people who have been applauding me have received no benefit and that, indeed, whatever benefit they might have had, has been killed in the applause, I am sore at heart and I lament and I feel as though I had spoken altogether in vain." Scholar, he was lecturing to scholars. His words were not meat, he thought, for the hounds of the press and, with an almost pathetic earnestness, he tried to shoo them away.* First, the Dean insisted that the New Testament contained no detailed guidance either for the making of sermons or for the conduct of modern civilization: "The gospel was good news, not .good advice. .. ,. . We can find no economic prin ciples in the Gospel."

The Roman Empire prepared the way for the gospel by disseminating international culture. "It was this civilization that created the Catholic Church and died in giving birth to it."

In earliest days, there was inter-Christian hatred. Theologians dis agreed. An immense influence upon the Catholic Church was the stoical Law of Nature derived from Greek philosophers: "The hostility of that Church to eugenics is ... based on the principle that it is contrary to the Law of Nature to forbid anyone, however diseased physically and morally, to marry and have children."

Following down the centuries, the Dean found idleness to be the sin of feudalism. Calvinism marked the disappearance of this sin among the governing classes. The Calvinists never loafed. Their religious life was vastly superior to the barons'. Calvinism "is different from all other forms of religion known, because it accepts the standards of Capitalism and defends them."

Finally, as to Christianity in the world today: "Our business is to lead in a crusade against a secularism which has failed. It has not pro duced beauty or happiness or contentment." But this must be done without mingling in politics: "Christ never preached a political revolution. His kingdom was not of this world. ..."

"In Science has come the chief revelation of the will and purpose of God that has been given to our time. It is more important that the preacher understand the results of Science than that he associate with social revolution. The struggle of the future may be between Science and sentimentalism, and it is by no means certain that the right side will win."