Paul's has
confessed that he is "one of the most powerful spiritual forces in our
generation."
It is, I think, the grave sincerity of his soul which gives him this
pre-eminence. He is not more eloquent than many others, he is not
greatly distinguished by scholarship, he is only one in a numerous
company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But
no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more
telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is
absorbed into a _Power_ which overshadows his presence and even sounds
in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken
everything for the Kingdom of God.
One who knows him far better than I do said to me the other day,
"Charles Gore has not aimed at harmonising his ideas with the Gospel,
but of fusing his whole spirit into the Divine Wisdom."
In one, and only one, respect, this salience of Dr. Gore may be likened
to the political prominence of Mr. Lloyd George. It is a salience
complete, dominating, unapproached, but one which must infallibly
diminish with time. For it is, I am compelled to think, the salience of
personality. History does not often endorse the more enthusiastic
verdicts of journalism, and personal magnetism is a force which
unhappily melts into air long before its tradition comes down to
posterity[3].
[Footnote 3: The genius of the Prime Minister, which makes so
astonishing an impression on the public, plainly lies in saving from
irretrievable disaster at the eleventh hour the consequences of his own
acts.
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