The Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, in London, is a fine scholar, a brilliant thinker, and a writer of admitted capacity. He is moreover a churchman who has not feared to approach the burning questions of the day from the broadest standpoint, and with a total disregard of the odium theologicum. When, therefore, it was announced, that he was to deliver the Romanes lecture this year, at Oxford, and that he had chosen for his subject, "The Idea of Progress," the great world which takes an interest in such matters was filled with expectation.
What the audience in the Sheldonian thought of the Dean's utterance it is impossible to say. The full text is not yet in the hands of the public. The newspaper précis give, however, a reliable summary, and the writer of that in "The Times" not unfairly heads it, "The Delusion of Progress." The fact is that the pessimism of the Dean as to the future of humanity seems to have reached its nadir in this Oxford address. Where, he asks despondently, is the evidence of the progress of the race? Except in the matter of experience, it does not appear to have gained anything from the time of the Greeks and the Romans. Its one valuable asset is hope, which the pagans dismissed as a fraud, and Christianity has elevated to a virtue. Hope, the Dean insists, is no fraud: it is "a solid fact;" and he goes on to adumbrate the theory that the human being lives in the hope of attaining the unattainable, and of reaching a knowledge "of the absolute values, truth, goodness, and beauty." As a result of this, he concludes, the path of progress is always open to the individual, whilst of the race, "it is safe to predict that it will go on hoping."
The Dean, in short, can apparently find no evidence of progress in human nature, and so turns to hope as the universal panacea. There is no such thing as a law of progress, he would seem to be saying: there is nothing but the constant ebb and flow of individual endeavor. It is just this point of view which has won for Dr. Inge the almost affectionate title of "the dismal Dean." The intense integrity of his outlook, his refusal to avoid awkward facts, and his repugnance from gilding shillings and calling them sovereigns, have brought him to the place where he can no longer disguise from himself the absence of law in human nature, and so takes refuge in hope. Now, in all of this, he is very much more scientific than his shallower critics are capable of discerning. There is no law but the law of God, the activity of Principle. Material law is the mere counterfeit of this, and does find its supposititious expression in the ebb and flow of human endeavor; whilst, as for hope, it is the indestructible fact of the existence of Principle which is inseparable from the supposititious existence of every counterfeit. It is inherent in the fact that it is impossible to tell a lie without Truth to lie about. It is the promise seen through a glass darkly of a reality some day to be seen face to face. Therefore, wrote the apostle, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." That is why hope is something more than what the world is satisfied with describing as "a solid fact;" it is a scientific fact.
