But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West.  If some thousands of years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen Chinese.  Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the English to Taoism or Buddhism.  There his passion for the moral beauties of paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve; his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the most Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.

In Christendom he will never find rest.  The perpetual public criticism and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a certain spirit far too deep to be defined.  It is deeper than democracy; nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the special defence of a minority or an individual.  It will often leave the ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost.  It will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice though the heavens fall.  Its highest expression is not even in the formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that all men were free and equal.  Its highest expression is rather in the formula of the peasant who said that a man’s a man for a’ that.  If there were but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to God night and day.  Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly works with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly personal immortality.  Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even happy merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a man.  A man’s meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there must always be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to the sacrament.  A man’s bed may be hard, but it must not be abject or unclean:  there must always be about the bed something of the decency of the death-bed.

This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil that threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot encourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out.  Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being Christian:  it is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered.  He had absent-mindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed.  I advise him to chuck it.