Dr. Temple has a notable gift of rapid statement and pellucid exposition.  One doubts if many theologians in the whole course of Christian history have covered more ground more trippingly than Dr. Temple covers in two little books called The Faith and Modern Thought, and The Kingdom of God.  His wonderful powers of succinct statement may perhaps give the impression of shallowness; but this is an entirely false impression—­no impression could indeed be wider of the mark.  His learning, though not so wide as Dean Inge’s, nor so specialised as the learning of Canon Barnes, is nevertheless true learning, and learning which has been close woven into the fabric of his intellectual life.  There are but few men in the Church of England who have a stronger grip on knowledge; and very few, if any at all, who can more clearly and vividly express in simple language the profoundest truths of religion and philosophy.

In order to show his quality I will endeavour to summarise his arguments for the Existence of God, with as many quotations from his writings as my space will permit.

“It is not enough to prove,” he says, “that some sort of Being exists.  In the end, the only thing that matters is the character of that Being.”  But how are we to set out on this quest since “Science will not allow us a starting point at all”?

He answers that question by carrying the war into the scientific camp, as he has a perfect right to do.  “Science makes one colossal assumption always; science assumes that the world is rational in this sense, that when you have thought out thoroughly the implications of your experience, the result is fact. . . .  That is the basis of all science; it is a colossal assumption, but science cannot move one step without it.”

Science begins with its demand that the world should be seen as coherent; it insists on looking at it, on investigating it, till it is so seen.  As long as there is any phenomenon left out of the systematic coherence that you have discovered, science is discontented and insists that either the system is wrongly or imperfectly conceived or else the facts have not been correctly stated.

This demand for “a coherent and comprehensive statement of the whole field of fact” comes solely from reason.  How do we get it?  We have no ground in experience for insisting that the world shall be regarded as intelligent, as “all hanging together and making up one system.”  But reason insists upon it.  This gives us “a kinship between the mind of man and the universe he lives in.”

Now, when man puts his great question to the universe, and to every phenomenon in that universe, Why?—­Why is this what it is, what my reason recognises it to be? is he not in truth asking, What is this thing’s purpose?  What is it doing in the universe?  What is its part in the coherent system of all-things-together?