I regard him as a man whose full worth will never be known till he is overtaken by a crisis.  I can see him moving smoothly and usefully in times of comparative peace to the Primacy, holding that high office with dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade.  But I cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm.  A great industrial upheaval, for example, where would that land him?  The very fact that one does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of distrust one may feel in his strength—­not of character—­but of personality.  He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat?  I am not sure.  On the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not been born in the episcopal purple.

By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great, but who has the seeds of greatness in him.  Events may prove him greater than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be.  A crisis, either in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather blurs the individual outline of his soul.  But, even with the dissipation of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition.  He does not, at present, convince one of original force.

Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of the Church, and so perhaps of the nation.  For from his boyhood up the Kingdom of God has meant to him a condition here upon earth in which the soul of man, free from all oppression, can reach gladly up towards the heights of spiritual development.

He hates in his soul the miserable state to which a conscienceless industrialism has brought the daily life of mankind.  He lays it down that “it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of brotherhood and fellowship.”  To this end he has brought about an important council of masters and men who are investigating with great thoroughness the whole economic problem, so thoroughly that the Bishop will not receive their report, I understand, till 1923—­a report which may make history.

As a member of the Society of Spirits, he says, “I have a particular destiny to fulfil.”  He is a moral being, conscious of his dependence on other men.  He traces the historic growth of the moral judgment: