William Ralph Inge was recognized during his lifetime as a prominent clergyman and one of England's outstanding literary figures. In the New World his sobriquet "The Gloomy Dean" was familiar to a generation of Americans, who had no notion what he was dean of nor the reason for his alleged gloom. He was best known as an exponent of a tradition in Anglican Christianity, a consistent and devoted preoccupation with the Divine Nature. Victorian though he may have been in temperament, Inge thought of hims as a citizen of a realm of timeless values. From what he believed to be an eternal and unchanging vantage point, he viewed--if not always with compassion, at least with a keen interest--the plight of a civilization enmeshed in a period of history characterized by dramatic and far-reaching changes in the structure of its thought