To 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 spent millions of years in moulding a bit of old red sandstone.

[Footnote 5:  “I have often thought that the unquestionable inferiority of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent defect in the German mind.”—­The Philosophy of Plotinus, p. 13]

Meanwhile we have our cocksure little guides, some of whom say to us, “That is primitive, therefore it is good,” and others, “This is up-to-date, therefore it is better.”  Not very wise persons any of them, I fear.

And again, writing of Catholic Modernism in France: