W.R. Inge, Co-operation with the Spirit of the Age (1911) Proverbs like, “Whoever marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widower” are known to all, but few read the work which it comes from, The Spirit of the Age, published 1911 by the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In this work, Dean Inge writes about the clergy’s tendency to fuse Christianity with the en-vogue secular trends of the day, and he explores the danger (even the foolishness) of getting entangled with fleeting fashionable secular obsessions. This short work strikes powerfully at us today, for today’s clergy are no less passionate about fusing the church to the social fads of the era. Dean Inge reminds what the focus of a Christian should be, and the right posture to take towards things which secularism obsesses about from decade to decade. Enjoy! W.R. Inge, Co-operation with the Spirit of the Age (1911)
Seems he had imbibed a bit of that spirit: "The Church was a Divine idea which required tens of thousands of years to reach its full development."
Indeed he himself fell prey, as we point out near the end of the work. Just goes to show how seductive the spirit of every age is, and how incredibly careful we must be about imbibing it.
The evil of nowadays. But it can become whatever it takes, it could be Positive Christianity with Hitler, Communist Orthodoxy with Stalin or what we have nowadays.
What I have read so far of these lectures has been quite interesting and very insightful. The best quote so far in my opinion has been: To this I would add that the same will likely be true of our own age. Today's progressivism may become tomorrow's orthodoxy, but if so, it will just as surely be rebelled against as the orthodoxies of prior ages have been.