John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua has been epigrammatically described as “the work of a French sceptic controlled by an English don—or a joint product of Voltaire and Bishop Butler.” Bishop Gore’s Belief in God, which might well be called his Apologia pro fide sua, is of the same dual and complementary parenthood as the earlier Apologia. Cardinal and Bishop alike belong to that resolute band of thinkers for whom the highest truths are to be discovered in a balance of probabilities and even of contradictories.

The younger apologist is hardly a less challenging personality than the elder. Few of the Tertullians or Origens of our day have had a life so crowded with happenings and doings. An Oxford Doctor of Divinity who identified his economic thought with Socialism, who interwove his theological thought with Rationalism, and who accepted the ecclesiastical mode of Anglo-Catholicism, had colour enough in his life to attract not only the undergraduate imagination of Oxford, but even the adult commercialism of Birming ham. There was no limit to the influence wielded by a man who seemed prepared to give up everything, even a belief or a Bishopric, in his thirst for the truth. Thus sceptics were dogmatic about the power wielded over men by a man who

. . . had been very far After where the shadows are.