WRITING ABOUT DEAN INGE (“the gloomy Dean” of St Paul’s Cathedral in the imaginations of the time), the Church Times, 100 Years Ago – 24th November 1911, said:

Deans are professional optimists, laudatores temporis hujus, and it is at least a novelty when one of them points out that going with the stream is what dead dogs do, and that licking the boots of democracy, or burning incense before the “silly fetish” of progress, is only an old slavish superstition upside down. When, moreover, he forecasts the conver­sion of Poplar and West Ham into grazing-farms, or ex­presses his be­lief that the State of the future, in reaction from the hysterical human­itarianism of to-day, will take away life more freely than it does at present, or affirms that the moral and economic outlook of Great Britain is “gloomy in the extreme”, men will very likely laugh and pass on. Never­theless, we are all out­growing the breezy con­fidence and buoyant Philis­tinism of the mid-Victorian era. . .

Hear the word of the prophets.