73

CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE

It was inevitable that the one-sidedness of the Liberal Protestant solution should produce a corresponding reaction, and at the beginning of this century advanced criticism turned abruptly to the opposite extreme. The eschatological school was inspired by a justifiable distrust of the Liberal tendency to interpret the life of Jesus in terms of modern thought and sentiment, and they were consequently led to depreciate the ethical element in the Gospel and to accentuate its catastrophic and apocalyptic character. In Dean Inge’s words, ” They stripped the figure of Jesus of all the attributes with which the devotion of centuries had invested it and have left us with a mild specimen of the Mahdi type, an apocalyptic dreamer whose message consisted essentially of predictions about the approaching catastrophic ‘ end of the age,’ predictions which of course came to nothing.”

Thus we are left with two contradictory solutions, neither of which affords any basis for punishment, crying for mercy instead of vengeance, and insisting, if only as a utilitarian measure, on counteracting evil, not with a contrary evil, but with good. Above all, he is a socialist, insisting on the organic conception of society, and affirming that we are members of one another in so intimate a sense that the misery and degradation of one are the misery and degradation of all.”

But ” we realise regretfully that Christ’s dream of a regenerated world is too lovely for the little minds that run the machine of instituted religion.”

74