“Science,” says Dr. Inge, “has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity.  She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor.”

I am sure Ronald Knox was never meant to shut his eyes and stop his ears against this movement of truth, and I am almost sure that he will presently find it impossible not to look, and not to listen.

And then . . . what then?

DR. L.P.  JACKS

JACKS, LAWRENCE PEARSALL, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford, since 1915; Professor of Philosophy, Manchester College, Oxford, since 1903; Editor of the Hibbert Journal since its foundation, 1902; b.  Nottingham, 1860; m. 1889 Olive Cecilia, d. of late Rev. Stopford Brooke.  Educ.:  University School, Nottingham; University of London (M.A., 1886); Manchester College; Goettingen; Harvard, U.S.A.; Hon. M.A., Oxford; Hon. L.L.D., Glasgow; Hon. D.D.  Harvard; entered Ministry as assistant to Rev. Stopford Brooke, in Bedford Chapel, 1887; subsequently at Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool, and the Church of the Messiah, Birmingham.

[Illustration:  Dr. L.P.  Jacks]

CHAPTER IV

DR. L.P.  JACKS

As an excellent amateur huntsman once said to me, “If you must cast, lead the hounds into the belief that they are doing it themselves.”—­JOHN ANDREW DOYLE.

One of the great ladies of Oxford was telling me the other day that she remembers a time when friends of hers refused, even with averted eyes and a bottle of smelling salts at the nose, to go down the road where Mansfield College had presumed to raise its red walls of Nonconformity.

To-day Manchester College, the seat of Unitarianism, stands on this same dissenting road, and thither the ladies of Oxford go up in great numbers to listen to the beautiful music which distinguishes the chapel service, the chapel itself already beautiful enough with windows by Burne-Jones.

On the altar-cloth of this chapel are embroidered the words, GOD IS LOVE.  No tables of stone flank that gentle altar, and no panelled creeds on the walls challenge the visitor to define his definitions.  The atmosphere of the place is worship.  The greatest of all Christ’s affirmations is reckoned enough.  God is love.  No need, then, to add—­Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the Company of Heaven . . .

The Principal of Manchester College is Dr. L.P.  Jacks, the Editor of The Hibbert Journal, the biographer of Stopford Brooke and Charles Hargrove, author of Mad Shepherds, Legends of Smokeover, and other books which have won the affection of many readers and the praise of no few scholars.  He is a man of letters, a man of nature, and a mystic.

His face bears a strange resemblance to the unforgettable face of that great Unitarian, James Martineau, whom Morley calls “the most brilliant English apologist of our day”; it lacks the marvellous sweetness of Martineau’s expression, but has a greater strength; it does not bear witness to so sure a triumph of serenity, but shows the marks of a fiercer battle, and the scars of deeper wounds.  It is the masculine of the other’s feminine.