“First, we must not be content to appeal to authority.  We must teach, fully teach, re-teach the truth on grounds of Scripture, reason, history, everything, so that we may have a party, a body which knows not only that it has got authority, but that it has got the truth and reason on its side.”

The claim is obviously courageous, the claim of a brave and noble man, but one wonders, Can it be made good?  It is a long time since evolution saw Athanasius laid in the grave, a long time since the Inquisition pronounced the opinions of Galileo to be heretical and therefore false.  “It is very hard to be a good Christian.”  Did Athanasius make it easier?  Did the Inquisition which condemned Galileo make it easier still?

Dr. Gore thinks that the supreme mistake of Christianity was placing itself under the protection and patronage of national governments.  It should never have become nationalised.  Its greatest and most necessitous demand was to stand apart from anything in the nature of racialism.

He mourns over an incoherent humanity; he seeks for unifying principles.  The religion of an Incarnation must have a message for the world, a message for the whole world, for all mankind.  Surely, surely.  But unifying principles are not popular in the churches.  It is the laity which objects to a coherent Gospel.

He sighs for a spiritualised Labour Party.  He shrinks from the thought of a revolution, but does not believe that the present industrial system can be Christianised.  There must be a fundamental change.  Christianity is intensely personal, but its individualism is of the spirit, the individualism of unselfishness.  He laughs grimly, in a low and rumbling fashion, on hearing that Communism is losing its influence in the north of England.  “I can quite imagine that; the last thing an Englishman will part with is his property.”

Laughter, if it can be called laughter, is rare on his lips, and is reserved in general for opinions which are in antagonism to his own.  He laughs in this way at the makeshift compromises of statesmen and theologians and economists saying that what those men hate more than anything else is a fixed principle.  He quotes with a sardonic pleasure the capital saying that a certain statesman’s idea of a settled policy based on fixed moral principles is a policy which will last from breakfast-time to luncheon—­he repeats the last words “from breakfast-time to luncheon,” with a deep relish, an indrawing of the breath, a flash of light in the glassy eyes.

He remains impenitent concerning his first instinct as to England’s duty at the violation of Belgium’s neutrality.  We were justified in fighting; we could do no other; it was a stern duty laid upon us by the Providence which overrules the foolishness of man.  But he is insistent that we can justify our fiery passion in War only by an equal passion in the higher cause of Peace—­no, not an equal passion, a far greater passion.