But though he is associated in the popular mind chiefly with modernism, Dr. Inge is not by any means only a controversial theologian. Above and beyond everything else, he is a mystic. You may find indications of this truth even in a book like _Outspoken Essays_, but they are more numerous in his two little volumes, _The Church and the Age_ and _Speculum Animæ_, and of course more numerous still in his great work on Plotinus[5]. He is far more a mystic than a modernist. Indeed I regard him as the Erasmus of modernism, one so sure of truth that he would trust time to work for his ideas, would avoid fighting altogether, but certainly all fighting that is in the least degree premature. The two thousand years of Christianity, he says somewhere, are no long period when we remind ourselves that God spent millions of years in moulding a bit of old red sandstone. [Footnote 5: "I have often thought that the unquestionable inferiority of German literature about Platonism points to an inherent defect in the German mind."--_The Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 13] Meanwhile we have our cocksure little guides, some of whom say to us, "That is primitive, therefore it is good," and others, "This is up-to-date, therefore it is better." Not very wise persons any of them, I fear. And again, writing of Catholic Modernism in France: We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M. Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the Kingdom of God which Christ preached was something much more than a platonic dream. We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our worship was a historical figure. I will give a few extracts from _Speculum Animæ_, a most valuable and most beautiful little book, which show the true bent of his mind: On all questions _about_ religion there is the most distressing divergency. But the saints do not contradict each other. Prayer . . . is "the elevation of the mind and heart to God." It is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we come into immediate contact with the things that cannot be shaken. Are we to set against such plain testimony the pessimistic agnosticism of a voluptuary like Omar Khayyám? _There was the Door to which I found no Key_. . . . May it not be that the door has no key because it has no lock? The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed.