[Footnote 33: The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Edward Dowden, LL.D. 1886.]

[Footnote 34: His third son.]

[Footnote 35: His elder daughter.]

[Footnote 36: His younger daughter.]

[Footnote 37: His fourth son.]

[Footnote 38: His eldest son.]

[Footnote 39: His second son.]

[Footnote 40: "Chastity was the supreme virtue in the eyes of the Church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. Continence was one of the most sacred pretensions by which the organized preachers of superstition claimed the reverence of men and women. It was identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that Infamous, against which the main assault of the time was directed."—Morley's Voltaire.]

[Footnote 41: "Rules of Cautions; or, Helps to Obedience: called by some the Hedge of the Law."—Bishop Andrews.]

[Footnote 42: F.W.H. Myers.]

[Footnote 43: Page 15.]

[Footnote 44: The allusion is to the late Mr. W. Hepworth Dixon, and his writings on the Polygamous Sects of America.]

[Footnote 45: W.E. Gladstone, The Church of England and Ritualism.]



CHAPTER VI

THEOLOGY

Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, after hearing a sermon by Dr. Howson, Dean of Chester, wrote thus in his diary: "One good bit—that the emptying Christianity of dogma would perish it, like Charlemagne's face when exhumed." It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry—October 5, 1869—that the good Dean's ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold's first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and the Philosopher he quizzed Colenso, "the arithmetical bishop who couldn't forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers,"[46] about his "jejune and technical manner of dealing with Biblical controversy." "It is," he wrote, "a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different things. The multitude will for ever confuse them.... Dr. Colenso, in his first volume, did all he could to strengthen the confusion, and to make it dangerous." "Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion."

But in that earlier essay he had merely criticised a critic; he had not originated criticisms of his own. So he had touched the field of theological controversy, but had not appeared on it as a performer. That now he so appeared was probably due to the success which attended Culture and Anarchy. The publication of that book had immensely extended the circle of his audience. Those who care for literature are few; those who care for politics are many. And, though the politics of Culture and Anarchy were new and strange, hard to be understood, and running in all directions off the beaten track, still the professional politicians, and that class of ordinary citizens which aims at cultivation and seeks a wider knowledge, took note of Culture and Anarchy as a book which must be read, and which, though they might not always understand it, would at least show them which way the wind was blowing. The present writer perfectly recalls the comfortable figure of a genial merchant, returned from business to his suburban villa, and saying: "Well, I shall spend this Saturday afternoon on Mat Arnold's new book, and I shall not understand one word of it." It had never occurred to the good man that he was either a Hebraizer or a Hellenizer. He had always believed that he was a Liberal, a Low Churchman, and a silk-mercer.

For Arnold to find that he was in possession of a pulpit—that he had secured a position from which he could preach his doctrine with a certainty that it would be heard and pondered, if not accepted—was a new and an invigorating experience. He at once began to make the most of his opportunity. While the Press was still teeming with criticisms of Culture and Anarchy, he began to extend his activities from the field of political and social criticism to that of theological controversy. The latter experiment seems to have grown spontaneously out of the former. In Culture and Anarchy he had charged Puritanism with imagining that in the Bible it had, as its own special possession, a unum necessarium, which made it independent of Sweetness and Light, and guided it aright without the aid of culture. "The dealings," he said, "of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul afford a noteworthy illustration of this. Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that apostle's greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final."

This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they relied; and more particularly of St. Paul. And this particular direction seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently published, of Renan: "After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign."

Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them the text of his treatise on St. Paul and Protestantism, which began to appear in October, 1869. "St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the real reign of St. Paul is only beginning."

In Culture and Anarchy he had shown how "the over-Hebraizing of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible." And he showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer's. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, "instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and Puritanism; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism. "The Church of England," he says, "existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism." Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and there show themselves in her documents, "and all which is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain"; whereas those schemes are the very life and substance of Puritanism and the Puritan bodies. "It is the positive Protestantism of Puritanism with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England." Leaving, then, the Church of England on one side, we fix our gaze on Puritanism, and we see that "the conception of the ways of God to man which Puritanism has formed for itself" has for its cardinal points the terms Election and Justification. "Puritanism's very reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital conception"; and, when we are told that St. Paul is a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, "we in England can best try the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth with St. Paul's."

Entering upon this endeavour, he divides Puritanism into Calvinism, and Arminianism or Methodism. The foremost place in Calvinistic theology belongs to Predestination; in Methodist theology to Justification by Faith. Calvinism relies most on man's fears; Methodism most on his hopes. Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal to the Bible, and above all to St. Paul, for the proof of what they teach. Very well then, says Arnold, we will enquire what Paul's account of God's proceedings with man really is, and whether it tallies with the various representations of the same subject which Puritanism, in its two main divisions, has given. We will also, he says, follow Puritanism's example and take the Epistle to the Romans as the chief place for finding what Paul really thought on the points in question.

He illustrates his argument freely by citations from the other undoubtedly Pauline epistles, but he characteristically attributes the Epistle to the Hebrews to Apollos, as being "just such a performance as might naturally have come from 'an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures,' and in whom the intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding somewhat dominated the religious perceptions." While he thus appeals unreservedly to St. Paul, he is careful to point out that we must retranslate him for ourselves if we wish to get rid of the preconceived doctrines of Election and Justification which the translators have read into him. A strong example of their method was to be found in the word atonement in Romans v. II, which has disappeared from our Revised Version, being replaced by reconciliation. The other point to be borne in mind is that Paul wrote about Religion "in a vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically.

With these cautions duly noted, Arnold goes to the order in which Paul's ideas naturally stand, and the connexion between one and another. Here the unlikeness between Paul and Puritanism at once appears. "What sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the desire to flee from the wrath to come; and what sets the Methodist in motion, the desire for eternal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion? It is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master-impulse of Hebraism—the desire for righteousness." How searching and keen and practical was Paul's idea of righteousness is shown by his long and frequent lists of moral faults to be avoided and of virtues to be cultivated. This zeal for righteousness marks the character of Paul both before and after his conversion. Nay, it explains his conversion. "Into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic doctrines of Christ, which brought a new aliment to feed this hunger and thirst—of Christ, whom he had never seen, but who was in every one's words and thoughts, the Teacher who was meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one another, that the last should often be first, that the exercise of dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable, and that we must become as little children—sank down and worked there even before Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the crisis of his conversion." As soon as that conversion was accomplished, as soon as Paul found himself a teacher and a leader in the new community, he resumed, with all his old vigour, though in an altered fashion, his labours for righteousness. In all his teaching he harps upon the same string. If he leaves the enforcement of the law even for a moment, it is only to establish it more victoriously. "This man, out of whom an astounding criticism has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he is gone there."

Righteousness then, as St. Paul conceives it, stands in keeping the law and so serving God. But to serve God, "to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task.... In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, 'every man is conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit.'" No one is more keenly conscious of this opposition than St. Paul himself. How is he to bring the evil and self-seeking tendencies of his composite nature into conformity with the law and will of God? "Mere commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition in the desires it tries to control.... Neither the law of nature nor the law of Moses availed to bind men to righteousness. So we come to the word which is the governing word of the Epistle to the Romans—the word all. As the word righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul's entire mind and life, so the word all is the governing word of this his chief epistle. The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. 'All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.' All do what they would not, and do not what they would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' Hitherto we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; we have now come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion." Paul is profoundly conscious of his own imperfections, of the tendencies in his nature which war against righteousness; of his inability, in common with all the human race, to follow perfectly the law of God. He has now come to know Christ's mind and life. Christ has, in his own phrase, apprehended him—laid hold on him; and he is persuaded that Christ so laid hold upon him in order to lead him into perfect, not partial, righteousness—into entire conformity with the will of God. In coming to know Christ, he had come to know perfect righteousness, and he desired to attain to it himself, believing that Christ had laid hold on him for that very purpose.

And when we come to the vision of that perfect Righteousness, and Paul's desire to attain to it, we are seasonably reminded of the order in which his ideas come. "For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is Christ's divinity which establishes His being without sin. For Paul, who approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Christ's being without sin which established His divinity. The large and complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and late, and only by Christ's help, awakened, in Christ he seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally. The devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Christ still stronger, by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining the righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order and with God's will, he saw no such impotence existing in Christ's case as in his own. For Christ, the uncertain conflict between the law in our members and the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove Paul to despair, in Christ were absent; smoothly and inevitably He followed the real and eternal order in preference to the momentary and apparent order. Obstacles outside there were plenty, but obstacles within Him there were none. He was led by the spirit of God; He was dead to sin, He lived to God; and in this life to God He persevered even to His cruel bodily death on the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, are the sons of God. If this is so with even us, who live to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience, how much more is He who lives to God entirely and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only son of God?" This, says Arnold, is undoubtedly the main line of movement which Paul's ideas respecting Christ follow; and so far we have no quarrel with our guide. But he hastily goes on to an assertion which seems arbitrary and controvertible. He is forced to admit that Paul, who saw perfect righteousness in Christ and believed in His Divinity because of it, also identified Him with that Eternal Word or Wisdom of God, which, according to Jewish theology, had been with God from the beginning, and through which the world was created. He also has to admit that Paul identified Christ with the Jewish Messiah who will some day appear to terminate the actual kingdoms of the world and establish His own. But in both these cases he treats St. Paul's idea as a kind of afterthought, due to his training in the scholastic theology of Judaism, and quite subsidiary to his paramount belief. That belief was that, if we would fulfil the law of God and live in righteousness, we must learn from the All-Holy Christ to die as He died to all moral faults, all rebellious instincts, and live with Him in ever-increasing conformity to His high example of moral perfection.

For the power which drew men to admire this sanctity and follow this example Paul had his own name. "The struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear man to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of sympathy and emotion"; and to this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of faith. So vital is this word to Paul's religious doctrine that all Pauline theology and controversy has centred in it and battled round it. "To have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified with Christ"—but how? Paul answers, "By dying with Him." All his teaching amounts to this, and it is enough. We must die with Christ to the law of the flesh, live with Christ to the law of the mind. To live with Christ after death is to rise with Him. It implies Resurrection. Here again Arnold is constrained to admit the validity of Catholic interpretation. He cannot deny that Paul believed absolutely in the physical, literal, and material fact of Christ's bodily Resurrection. But he insists that, while accepting this fact, Paul lays far more stress upon the spiritual interpretation of it. For Paul, death is living after the flesh; life is mortifying the flesh by the spirit; "resurrection is the rising, within the sphere of our earthly existence, from death in this sense to life in this sense."

But, though St. Paul so often uses the word Resurrection in this spiritual and mystical sense, it cannot be denied that he uses it also, uses it primarily, in its physical and literal sense. In that sense, it implies a physical and literal Death of Christ. And on that Death, what is St. Paul's teaching? Not that it was a substitution, or a satisfaction, or an appeasement of wrath or an expiation of guilt—but that in it and by it "Christ parted with what, to men in general, is the most precious of things—individual self and selfishness; He pleased not Himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the Cross this death"; in all this seeking to show His followers that whosoever would cease from sin and follow Righteousness must be prepared to "suffer in the flesh."

Arnold thus sums up his general contention: "The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them—calling, justification, sanctification; they are rather these: dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ." And thus he concludes his controversy with the theologians who have misinterpreted their favourite Apostle: "It is to Protestantism, and its Puritan Gospel, that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach. St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with finding it; from first to last the practical religious sense never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have called 'diseased about questions and word-battlings.' He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday when in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to have been taken away from its heart; it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.... The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain covered; it will edify the Church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All, all, will be too little to pay half the debt which the Church of God owes to this 'least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God.'"



The articles of which the foregoing pages give the substance were published in the Cornhill Magazine for October and November, 1869. On November 13, Arnold wrote with glee that the organs of the Independent and the Baptist Churches showed that he had "entirely reached the special Puritan class he meant to reach." "Whether," he said, "I have rendered St. Paul's ideas with perfect correctness or not, there is no doubt that the confidence with which these people regarded their conventional rendering of them was quite baseless, made them narrow and intolerant, and prevented all progress. I shall have a last paper at Christmas, called Puritanism and the Church of England, to show how the Church, though holding certain doctrines like justification in common with Puritanism, has gained by not pinning itself to those doctrines and nothing else, but by resting on Catholic antiquity, historic Christianity, development, and so on, which open to it an escape from all single doctrines as they are outgrown."

That "last paper" appeared in due course, and it stated the position of the Church of England as the historical and continuous Church in this land, with an uncompromising directness which would have satisfied Bishop Stubbs or Professor Freeman. With equal directness, it affirmed that Protestantism, "with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine." It traced, briefly but very clearly, the history and development of the Universal Church, justified the Church of England in separating from Rome on account of Rome's moral corruptions, condemned the Nonconformists for separating on the mere ground of opinion, extolled the comprehensiveness and simplicity of Anglican formularies, and suggested to the Dissenters that, if they would only swallow their objections to Episcopacy and rejoin the Church of England, they might greatly strengthen the national organization for promoting Religion. In doing this they would only obey the natural instinct which bids all Christians worship together. "Securus colit orbis terrarum"—those pursue the purpose best who pursue it together. For, unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church's growth shows, to pursue it together."

The two papers on St. Paul and Protestantism together with that on Puritanism and the Church of England were published in 1870 in a single volume bearing the former title, and to this volume Arnold prefixed a preface, enforcing his doctrine with some vigorous hits at a dissenting Member of Parliament called Winterbotham, for glorying in an attitude of "watchful jealousy"; at Mill for his "almost feminine vehemence of irritation" against the Church of England, at Fawcett for his "mere blatancy and truculent hardness." He concluded by re-affirming his main object in this theological controversy. "To disengage the religion of England from unscriptural Protestantism, political Dissent, and a spirit of watchful jealousy, may be an aim not in our day reachable, and still it is well to level at it."

The book produced a strong and immediate effect. As Culture and Anarchy first obtained for its author a hearing from politicians and social reformers, so St. Paul and Protestantism obtained him a hearing from clergymen, religious teachers, and amateurs of theology. Dr. Vaughan, then just appointed Master of the Temple, was moved to preach a sermon,[47] pointing out—what indeed was true enough—that Arnold omitted from St. Paul's teaching all reference to the Divine Pardon of Sin, or, as theologians would say, to the Atonement. But on the other hand, Bishop Fraser seems to have approved. "The question is," wrote Arnold, "is the view propounded true? I believe it is, and that it is important, because it places our use of the Bible and our employment of its language on a basis indestructibly solid. The Bishop of Manchester told me it had been startlingly new to him, but the more he thought of it, the more he thought it was true."[48]

He himself was delighted with this success. He hoped to exercise a "healing and reconciling influence" in the troubled times which he saw ahead; "and it is this which makes me glad to find—what I find more and more—that I have influence." He delighted in finding that the "May Meetings" abounded in comments on St. Paul and Protestantism. "We shall see," he exclaims gleefully, "great changes in the Dissenters before long." "The two things—the position of the Dissenters and the right reading of St. Paul and the New Testament—are closely connected; and I am convinced the general line I have taken as to the latter has a lucidity and inevitableness about it which will make it more and more prevail." The book soon reached a second edition, and he wrote thus about it to his friend Charles Kingsley: "I must have the pleasure of sending you, as soon as it is reprinted, a little book called St. Paul and Protestantism, which the Liberals and physicists thoroughly dislike, but which I had great pleasure and profit in thinking out and writing."

And now he was fairly embarked, for good or for evil, on his theological career. He had exalted the Church of England as the historic Church in this land: he had poured scorn on "hole-and-corner religions" of separatism; he had advised the Dissenters to submit to Episcopal government and return to the Church and strengthen its preaching power: and he had re-stated, in terminology of his own, what he conceived to be St. Paul's teaching on Religion. This work was completed in 1870, and in 1871 he began to publish instalments of a book which appeared in 1873 under the title Literature and Dogma. The scope and purpose of this book may best be given in his own words. It deals with "the relation of Letters to Religion: their effect upon dogma, and the consequences of this to religion." His object is "to reassure those who feel attachment to Christianity, to the Bible, and who recognize the growing discredit befalling miracles and the super-natural."

"If the people are to receive a religion of the Bible, we must find for the Bible some other basis than that which the Churches assign to it, a verifiable basis and not an assumption. This new religion of the Bible the people may receive; the version now current of the religion of the Bible they will not receive."

He sets out on this enterprise by repeating what he had said in St. Paul and Protestantism about the misunderstandings which had arisen from affixing to certain phrases such as grace, new birth, and justification, a fixed, rigid, and quasi-scientific meaning. "Terms which with St. Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms." In saying this he goes no further than several of his predecessors and contemporaries on the Liberal side in theology. Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that "Nothing in the Church's history has been more fertile in discord and error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor."[49] Bishop Hampden's much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from schoolmen and mataphysicians. Dean Stanley's unrivalled powers of literary exposition were consistently employed in the same endeavour. To call Abraham a Sheikh was only an ingenious attempt at naturalizing Genesis. But in Literature and Dogma Arnold applies this method far more fundamentally. According to him, even "God" is a literary term to which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied. He pronounces, without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in reason for the idea that God is a "Person, the First Great Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe." We are not to dream that He is a "Being who thinks and loves"; or that we can love Him or address our prayers to Him with any chance of being heard. What then, according to Arnold, is God? and here he answers with his celebrated definition. God is a "stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for Righteousness," or good conduct. Because this power works eternally and unchangeably, it is called "The Eternal," which thus becomes a sort of nickname for God. And as for our relations with God, called by most people Religion, well—"Religion is morality touched by Emotion." This, and nothing more.

For the beginnings of religious history, he goes to the House of Israel. The Israelites, as he was always insisting, had a strong sense for Righteousness, or Conduct; and they found happiness in pursuing it. The idea of Righteousness was their God, and the enjoyment of Righteousness their religion. This simple conception held its own for generations; but, by the time of the Maccabees, the Israelites had become familiar with the idea of a resurrection from the dead and a final judgment. "The phantasmagories of more prodigal and wild imaginations have mingled with the product of Israel's austere spirit."

"Israel, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at His coming, and to share in the triumph of the Saints of the Most High." This, says Arnold, was Extra-belief, "Aberglaube," belief beyond what is certain and veritable. "Extra-belief is the poetry of life." The Messianic ideas were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came. When He came, Israel was looking for a Messiah; and, when He began to preach, the better conscience of Judaism recognized in His teaching a new aspect of religion which it had desired. National Righteousness had been the idea of the older Judaism. Personal righteousness was the idea of the New Teaching. "Jesus took the individual Israelite by himself apart, made him listen for the voice of his conscience, and said to him in effect: 'If every one would mend one, we should have a new world.'" A Teacher so winning, so acceptable, so in unison with Israel's higher aspirations must surely be the Messiah whom earlier generations had expected; and so, in virtue of the purity and nobility of His teaching, Jesus Christ attained His unique position. He became, in popular acceptance, the Great, the Unique Man, in some sense the Son of God, Prophet and Teacher of the new and nobler morality. So there grew up "a personal devotion to Jesus Christ, who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a passage for it into their hearts." And almost immediately after "Aberglaube" regathered; and devotion to Jesus took the form of an Extra-belief of some future advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the triumphs of His followers. And this process of development, begun while Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death. "As time went on, and Christianity spread wider and wider among the multitude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of God meant to believe other points of the legend—His preternatural conception and birth, His miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His future triumphant return to judgment. And these and like matters are what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as the essentials of belief."

From this account, strangely inadequate indeed, but not positively offensive, of the origin and development of Christianity, he passes on to the attempts made by current theology to prove the truth of Christianity from Prophecy and Miracle. With regard to prophecy, he has little difficulty in showing that predictions have often miscarried, and that passages in the Old Testament have been interpreted as relating to Christ, which probably had no such reference. Thus the first disciples clearly expected the Second Advent to occur in their own life-time; and it has not occurred yet. "The Lord said unto my Lord" is better rendered "The Eternal said unto my lord the King"; and is "a simple promise of victory to a royal leader." So, in something less than four pages, he dismisses the proof from Prophecy, and goes on to the proof from Miracles. "Whether we attack them or whether we defend them, does not much matter. The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away from them. And for this reason: it sees, as its experience widens, how they arise." Our duty, then, if we love Jesus Christ and value the New Testament, is to make men see that the claim of Christianity to our allegiance is not based upon Miracles, but rests on quite other grounds, substantial and indestructible. The good faith of the writers of the New Testament—the "reporters of Jesus," as Arnold oddly calls them—is admitted; but, if we are to read their narratives to any profit, we must convince ourselves of their "liability to mistake." Excited, impassioned, wonder-loving disciples surrounded the simplest acts and words of Christ with a thaumaturgical atmosphere, and, when He merely exercised His power of moral help and healing, the "reporters" declared that He cured the sick and drove out evil spirits. In brief, when the "reporters" narrated miracles wrought by Christ, they were deceived; but, in spite of that, they were excellent men, and our obligations to them are great. "Reverence for all who, in those first dubious days of Christianity, chose the better part, and resolutely cast in their lot with 'the despised and rejected of men'! Gratitude to all who, while the tradition was yet fresh, helped by their writings to preserve and set clear the precious record of the words and life of Jesus!"

And yet that record, as they wrote it, is, according to Arnold, brimful of errors, both in fact and in interpretation; and the Church, which has preserved their written tradition, and kept it concurrently with her own oral tradition, has fallen into enormous and fundamental delusion about those "words" and that "life." "Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth, inexhaustible value, a boundless future. But our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracles—and miracles do not happen."

The fact that, in the preface to the popular edition of Literature and Dogma, he italicized those last words would appear to show that he attached some special, almost "thaumaturgical," value to them. Miracles do not happen. It has been justly observed that any man, woman, or child that ever lived might have said this, and have caused no startling sensation. But when Arnold uttered these words, emphasized them, and seemed to base his case against the Catholic creed upon them, it behoved his disciples to ponder them, and to enquire if, and how far, they were true.

As far as we know, there never was but one human being to whom they proved overwhelming, and he is a character in a popular work of fiction. "Miracles do not happen" broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere's faith. That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and "boyish innocence of mood," and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany. "A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an articulate word to say in its defence.... What weapons the Rector wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded."[50]

A happily-conceived picture—was it in Punch?—represented the Rector on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, "Pray, pray, don't mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to resign my living." However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere apparently read Literature and Dogma, and, when he came to "Miracles do not happen" he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold would have called "a hole-and-corner" religion of his own.

Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out. This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author's observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold's dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of a different type—a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived—might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order—in common parlance, miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses—some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific—appeared in great numbers. "Grave objections are alleged against the book.... Its conclusions about the meaning of the term God, and about man's knowledge of God, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-documents in general, to our account of the Canon of the Gospels, to our estimate of the Fourth Gospel." To these criticisms Arnold might have added one yet more cogent. It was felt by many of his readers, and even by some of his most attached disciples, that the "sinuous, easy, unpolemical method" which he vaunted, and which he applied so happily to criticism of books and life, was not grave enough, or cogent enough, when applied to the criticism of Religion. From first to last his method was arbitrary. [Greek: Hantos hepha]—the Master said it. This was excellent when he criticised literature. To say that a verse of Macaulay's was painful, or a line of Francis Newman's hideous, was well within his province. To say that one author wrote in the Grand Style and that another showed the Note of Provinciality—that also was his right. To pronounce that a passage from Sophocles was religious poetry of the highest and most edifying type,[51] whereas the Eternal Power was displeased by "such doggerel hymns as

Sing Glory, Glory, Glory, to the Great God Triune,"

this again was all very well; for matters of this kind do not admit of argument and proof. But, when it comes to handling Religion, this arbitrary method—this innate and unquestioning claim to settle what is good or bad, true or false—provokes rebellion. No one was more severe than Arnold on the folly of Puritanism in founding its doctrine of Justification on isolated texts borrowed from St. Paul; yet no one was more confident than he that man's whole conception of God could be safely based on the fact that at a certain period of their history the Jews took to expressing God by a word which signifies "Eternal." "Rejoice and give thanks," "Rejoice evermore," are certainly texts of Holy Writ; but he seems to think that, by merely quoting them, he has abrogated all the sterner side of the Bible's teaching about human life and destiny. An even more curious instance of literary self-confidence may be cited from his treatment of the Lord's commission to the Apostles. "It is extremely improbable that Jesus should ever have charged his Apostles to 'baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'" But "He may perfectly well have said: 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.'" The one formula seems to Arnold anachronistic and unlikely, the other perfectly natural. This is all very interesting and may be very true; but it is too dogmatic to be convincing. In such a case one may respectfully cry out that Letters are overstepping their province; and that one man's sense of fitness, style, and literary likelihood is not sufficient warrant for discrediting a well-tested and established document.



Yet, after all, documents, however well-tested and established, are not the backbone of the Christian religion. It may well be that to minds inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in "the Bible and the Bible only" as the ground of their religion; Arnold's solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and revolutionary. But they fell harmless on the minds which had long schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the Canon were resolved into mere literature.

Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal to History. He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed. It was easy enough to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who write to the Guardian. But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone, with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority; and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy fashion, that "it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these matters satisfactorily."

But, though clergymen are thus put quietly out of court, a layman may still be heard; and one could almost wish that he had lived to handle, in some fresh preface to Literature and Dogma, such a confession of faith as that which Lord Salisbury gave in 1894—

"To me, the central point is the Resurrection of Christ, which I believe. Firstly, because it is testified by men who had every opportunity of seeing and knowing, and whose veracity was tested by the most tremendous trials, both of energy and endurance, during long lives. Secondly, because of the marvellous effect it had upon the world. As a moral phenomenon, the spread and mastery of Christianity is without a parallel. I can no more believe that colossal moral effects can be without a cause, than I can believe that the various motions of the magnet are without a cause, though I cannot wholly explain them. To any one who believes the Resurrection of Christ, the rest presents little difficulty. No one who has that belief will doubt that those who were commissioned by Him to speak—Paul, Peter, Mark, John—carried a Divine message. St. Matthew falls into the same category. St. Luke has the warrant of the generation of Christians who saw and heard the others."

So far the testimony of a layman. Arnold, as we know, loved and elegized one Dean of Westminster. Would he have tolerated the testimony of another?

"The Church believes to-day in the Resurrection of Christ, because she has always believed in it. If all the documents which tell the story of the first Easter Day should disappear, the Church would still shout her Easter praises, and offer her Easter sacrifice of thanksgiving; for she is older than the oldest of her documents, and from father to son all through the centuries she has passed on the message of the first Easter morning—'The Lord is risen indeed.' The Church believes in the Resurrection because she is the product of the Resurrection."[52]

But, in spite of varied criticism, Literature and Dogma was well received. Three editions were published in 1873; a fourth in 1874; a fifth in 1876, and the "popular edition" in 1883. As usual, he was serenely pleased with his handiwork. In 1874 he wrote to his sister: "It will more and more become evident how entirely religious is the work which I have done in Literature and Dogma. The enemies of religion see this well enough already." Ten years later, he wrote from Cincinnati: "What strikes me in America is the number of friends Literature and Dogma has made me, amongst ministers of religion especially—and how the effect of the book here is conservative."

To the various criticisms of the book he began replying in the Contemporary Review for October, 1874. In November of that year he wrote to Lady de Rothschild: "You must read my metaphysics in this last Contemporary. My first and last appearance in the field of metaphysics, where you, I know, are no stranger." The completed reply was published as God and the Bible in 1875. This reply, which contained, as he thought, "the best prose he had ever succeeded in writing," was a reassertion and development of the previous work, and was written, as the preface said, "for a reader who is more or less conversant with the Bible, who can feel the attraction of the Christian religion, but who has acquired habits of intellectual seriousness, has been revolted by having things presented solemnly to him for his use which will not hold water, and who will start with none of such things even to reach what he values. Come what may, he will deal with this great matter of religion fairly. It is the aim of the present volume, as it was the aim of Literature and Dogma, to show to such a man that his honesty will be rewarded.... I write to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything."

It was, we must suppose, with the same benign intention that in 1877 he addressed himself to the task of persuading the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution that Bishop Butler was an untrustworthy guide in that mysterious region which lies between Philosophy and Religion. For this task, as Mr. Gladstone justly observed: he "was placed, by his own peculiar opinions, in a position far from auspicious with respect to this particular undertaking. He combined a fervent zeal for the Christian religion with a not less boldly avowed determination to transform it beyond the possibility of recognition by friend or foe. He was thus placed under a sort of necessity to condemn the handiwork of Bishop Butler, who in a certain sense gives it a new charter." Over Butler's grave stands a magnificent inscription, from the pen of Southey, which well illustrates the estimation in which for upwards of a century he was held by the serious mind of England—

Others had established the Historical and Prophetical grounds of the Christian Religion, and that sure testimony of its truth which is found in its perfect adaptation to the heart of man. It was reserved for him to develop its analogy to the Constitution and Course of Nature; and, laying his strong foundations in the depth of that great argument, there to construct another and irrefragable proof: thus rendering Philosophy subservient to Faith, and finding in outward and visible things the type and evidence of those within the veil.

In his lectures on Butler, Arnold set out to prove that the Philosophy was as unsound as the Faith to which it was subservient; and that it could not hold its own against Atheism or Agnosticism, but only against a system which conceded a Personal Governor of the Universe. This is the argument against the Deists which he puts into Butler's mouth: "You all concede a Supreme Personal First Cause, the almighty and intelligent Governor of the Universe; this, you and I both agree, is the system and order of nature. But you are offended at certain things in revelation.... Well, I will show you that in your and my admitted system of nature there are just as many difficulties as in the system of revelation." And on this, says Arnold, he does show it, "and by adversaries such as his, who grant what the Deist or Socinian grants, he never has been answered, he never will be answered. The spear of Butler's reasoning will even follow and transfix the Duke of Somerset,[53] who finds so much to condemn in the Bible, but 'retires into one unassailable fortress—faith in God.'"[54] Butler's method, then, is allowed to be potent enough to crush all such half-believers as still clung to the idea of a Personal God and Intelligent Ruler; but it had no force or cogency against such as, following Arnold, attenuated the idea of God into a Stream of Tendency. This theme he elaborated with great ingenuity and characteristic dogmatism in his Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist; and, inasmuch as no task can be more distasteful than to attack the teaching of a man whose genius and character one recognizes among the formative influences of one's life, I will leave the upshot of this ill-starred endeavour to be summarized by Butler's great champion, Mr. Gladstone—

"Various objections have been taken from various quarters to this point and that in the argument of Butler; but Mr. Arnold's criticisms, as a whole, remain wholly isolated and unsupported. It is impossible to acquit him of the charge of a carelessness implying levity, and of an ungovernable bias towards finding fault.... Mr. Arnold himself will probably suffer more from his own censures than the great Christian philosopher who is the object of them. And it is well for him that all they can do is to effect some deduction from the fame which has been earned by him in other fields, as a true man, a searching and sagacious literary critic, and a poet of genuine creative genius."[55]

It is now time to enquire what practical effect he produced by all this writing (and a good deal which followed it in the same sense) on the religious thought of his time. This is a question which, in the absence of any clear or general testimony, one can only answer by the light of one's own experience. The present writer can aver that, so far as his own personal knowledge goes, the strange case of Robert Elsmere was a unique instance. He has, of course, known plenty of people to whom, alas! revealed Religion—the accepted Faith of the Church and the Gospel—was a tale of no meaning, which they regarded either with blank indifference or with bitter and furious hostility. But, in all these cases, dissent from the Christian creed depended upon negations far deeper than "Miracles do not happen." It depended on a stark incapacity to conceive the ideas of God, of permitted evil, of sin, its consequences and its remedy, and of life after death. Where there was the capacity to conceive these mysteries, men were not troubled by the minor questions of miracle, prophecy, and textual research. To use an illustration which the present writer has used elsewhere, they were not shaken by Robert Elsmere, not confirmed by Lux Mundi. Still less were they agitated by the literary dogmaticism of Matthew Arnold. Many people disliked his style, his methods, his illustrations; and, not knowing the man, disliked him also. But, as he justly observed, if he had written as these objectors wished him to write, no one would have read him; so he went on in his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" way; and the people who disliked him closed their ears, and "flocked all the more eagerly to Messrs. Moody and Sankey."

Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1895—"It is very difficult to keep one's temper in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches on religious matters. His patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive and trying than rank unbelief."

But then again there were those—and we should hope the great majority—who, whether they knew the man or not, loved his temper, admired his methods, and found no more difficulty in detaching what was good from what was bad in his teaching, than he himself found in the case of his master, Wordsworth. A Catholic priest, ministering formerly in the Roman and now in the English Church, thus describes the help which he gained from Arnold at a time of distress and transition. "That I held to any sort of Christianity, and continued to use and enjoy the Bible, I owe entirely to Matthew Arnold. I began to read him in 1882; first his prose, and then his verse. For several years I read him over, and over, and over again with growing delight and profit; until, so far as I was able, I understood something of his mind and methods. He taught me how to think, and how to write. He undoubtedly saved me from leaving the Papal Church a dulled and blank materialist, thoroughly and violently anti-Christian; and his gentle influence tended me through the next few years, until I was mellowed for the process of reconstruction."[56]

This is a fine tribute to all that was best and most characteristic in his teaching. Beyond doubt, by his insistence on the relation of Letters to Religion, he helped many young men to read their Bibles with better understanding and keener appreciation; and enabled them that are without to enter for the first time into the spirit and attractiveness of the Christian ideal. Not only so, but men established in age, position, and orthodoxy, felt and acknowledged his helpfulness. When he delivered an address on "The Church of England" to a gathering of clergy at Sion College, he tells us that "Clergyman on clergyman turned on the Chairman" (who had scented heresy), "and said they agreed with me far more than with him." A divine so profoundly Evangelical as Bishop Thorold larded his sermons and charges with extracts from Arnold's prose and verse. In 1893 Arnold dined with Archbishop Benson, and "thought it a gratifying marvel, considering what things I have published"; but the marvel was of such frequent occurrence that it had almost ceased to be marvellous. That this was so was due, no doubt, in great measure to the charm of his character and conversation. It was not easy for any one who knew him to take serious offence at what he wrote. Just as Coleridge's metaphysics were said by a friend to be "only his fun," so Arnold's theology was regarded by his admirers as part of his playfulness. It was difficult to disentangle what he really wished to teach from his jokes about the hangings of the Celestial Council-Chamber; "Willesden beyond Trent"; "Change Alley and Alley Change"; Professor Birks, "his brows crowned with myrtle," going in procession to the Temple of Aphrodite; the Duke of Somerset "running into the strong tower" of Deism, and thinking himself "safe" there from further questionings. This method of illustration threw an air of comedy over the theme which it illustrated; and, if the criticism failed to disturb faith in Biblical theology, the critic had only himself to thank.

Another element in the satisfaction with which dignitaries and clergymen came to regard him was the fact that he was so definitely a supporter of the Church of England. To the principle of Established Churches, as part of the wider principle of extending everywhere the scope of the State, he was always friendly; but he felt the difficulty of maintaining them where, as in Scotland, they had nothing to show except "a religious service which is perhaps the most dismal performance ever invented by man," and a theology shared by all the non-established bodies round about. No such difficulty appeared in the case of the Church of England, with its historic claim, its seemly worship, its distinctive doctrine; so of that Church as by law established he was the consistent defender. Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent. Margate was, in his eyes, a "brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity." When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the National Church-yards, he likened the dissenting Service to a reading from Eliza Cook, and the Church's Service to a reading from Milton, and protested against the Liberal attempt to "import Eliza Cook into a public rite." He even was bold enough to cite his friend Mr. John Morley as secretly sharing this repugnance to Eliza Cook in a public rite. "Scio, rex Agrippa, quia credis. He is keeping company with his Festus Chamberlain and his Drusilla Collings, and cannot openly avow the truth; but in his heart he consents to it."

For the beauty, the poetry, the winningness of Catholic worship and Catholic life Arnold had the keenest admiration. "The need for beauty is a real and ever rapidly growing need in man; Puritanism cannot satisfy it, Catholicism and the Church of England can." He dwelt with delighted interest on Eugenie de Guerin's devotional practices, her happy Christmas in the soft air of Languedoc, her midnight Mass, her beloved Confession. On the Mass itself no one has written more sympathetically, although he disavowed the fundamental doctrine on which the Mass is founded. "Once admit the miracle of the 'atoning sacrifice,' once move in this order of ideas, and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him?"

In truth he had a strong sense, uncommon in Protestants, of Worship as distinct from Prayer—of Worship as the special object of a religious assembly. When he gave a Prayer-book to a child, he wrote on the flyleaf: "We have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him." "In religion," he said, "there are two parts: the part of thought and speculation, and the part of worship and devotion.... It does not help me to think a thing more clearly, that thousands of other people are thinking the same; but it does help me to worship with more devotion, that thousands of other people are worshipping with me. The connexion of common consent, antiquity, public establishment, long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious worship." He quotes with admiration his favourite Joubert: "Just what makes worship impressive is its publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its observance, universally and visibly holding its sway through all the details both of our outward and of our inward life."

"Worship," he says, "should have in it as little as possible of what divides us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act."

Again he quotes Joubert: "The best prayers are those which have nothing distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple adoration."

"Catholic worship," he said, "is likely, however modified, to survive as the general worship of Christians, because it is the worship which, in a sphere where poetry is permissible and natural, unites most of the elements of poetry." And again, "Unity and continuity in public religious worship are a need of human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christendom. A Catholic Church transformed is, I believe, the Church of the future."

His speculations on that future are interesting and, naturally, not always consistent. In 1879 he writes to Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff: "Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return-current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic." In 1880 he sees a great future for Catholicism, which, by virtue of its superior charm and poetry, will "endure while all the Protestant sects (amongst which I do not include the Church of England) dissolve and perish." In 1881 he seemed to apprehend the return to Westminster Abbey, after "Wisdom's too short reign," of—

Folly revived, re-furbish'd sophistries, And pullulating rites externe and vain.

In the last autumn of his life he wrote to M. Fontanes—a friend whose acquaintance he first made over St. Paul and Protestantism—

"Your letter has reached me here (Ottery St. Mary), where I am staying with Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, who is a grand-nephew of the poet. He loves literature, and, being a great deal richer than his grand-uncle, or than poets in general, has built a library from which I now write, and on which I wish that you could feast your eyes with me.... The Church Congress has just been held, and shows as usual that the clergy have no idea of the real situation; but indeed the conservatism and routine in religion are such in England that the line taken by the clergy cannot be wondered at. Nor are the conservatism and routine a bad thing, perhaps, in such a matter; but the awakening will one day come, and there will be much confusion. Have you looked at Tolstoi's books on religion: in French they have the titles Ma Religion, Ma Confession, Que Faire? The first of these has been well translated, and has excited much attention over here; perhaps it is from this side, the socialist side that the change is likely to come: the Bible will be retained, but it will be said, as Tolstoi says, that its true, socialistic teaching has been overlooked, and attention has been fixed on metaphysical dogmas deduced from it, which are at any rate, says Tolstoi, secondary. He does not provoke discussion by denying or combating them; he merely relegates them to a secondary position.



And now that we have enquired into Arnold's influence on theology, it is, perhaps, proper to ask what he himself believed. His faith seems to have been, by a curious paradox, far stronger on the Christian than on the Theistic side. "A Stream of Tendency" can never satisfy the idea of God, as ordinary humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57]

But he had, as we have already seen, an unending admiration—a homage which did not stop far short of worship—for the character and teaching of Jesus Christ; and he placed salvation in conformity to that teaching, as it is explained by St. Paul. And this meant death to sin; the abrogation and annulment of bad habits and tendencies; resurrection with Christ to the higher life which He taught us to pursue. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. He would have allowed no antithesis between the two halves of the text, but would have taught that the eternal welfare of man consisted in obeying the Law, receiving the Grace, and pursuing the Truth.

Nothing more dogmatic than this could safely be put forward as representing his theology; but, though not dogmatic, his mind was intensely ecclesiastical. His contempt for individual whims and fancies, his love of corporate action and collective control, operated as powerfully in the religious as in the social sphere. He admired and clave to the Church of England because it was not, like Miss Cobbe's new religion and the British College of Health, the product of an individual fancy, setting out to make all things new on a plan of its own. The Church of England, whether it could theologically be called "Catholic" or not, was certainly "the continuous and historical Church of this country." In 1869 he praised his friend Temple, afterwards Archbishop, for "showing his strong Church feeling, and sense of the value and greatness of the historic development of Christianity, of which the Church is the expression." It was the National organ for promoting Righteousness and Perfection by means of Culture and for diffusing Sweetness and Light. In the last year of his life he wrote to Mr. Lionel Tollemache: "I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a Liberal Anglican; and I think the times are in favour of our being allowed so to call ourselves."

As regards differences of opinion inside the Church, he saw no harm in them. He held that the Church must maintain Episcopacy as a matter of historical development, and as "its link with the past—its share in the beauty and the poetry and the charm for the imagination," which belong to Catholicism. This being so, the "latitudinarianism of the Broad Churchmen" who wished to entice the Dissenters into the Church was "quite illusory" so long as opposition to Episcopacy was one of the main tenets of Nonconformity. But he thought that the Church was likely before long to get rid of the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles; and he urged that, as no one could enforce belief in such doctrines as the Real Presence, Apostolic Succession, and Priestly Absolution, Churchmen who rejected these could quite comfortably remain in the Church, side by side with others who accepted them.

The Church, then, as historically descended and legally established, ought to be maintained, honoured, and frequented; and, so far, his practice accorded with his belief. He had indeed no more sympathy with hysterical devotions than with fanatical faiths. He saw with amused eye the gestures and behaviour of the "Energumens" during the celebration of Holy Communion in a Ritualistic church—"the floor of the church strewn with what seem to be the dying and the dead, progress to the altar almost barred by forms suddenly dropping as if they were shot in battle, the delighted adoption of vehement rites, till yesterday unknown, adopted and practised now with all that absence of tact, measure, and correct perception in things of form and manner, all that slowness to see when they are making themselves ridiculous, which belongs to the people of our English race."

This was a perfectly just criticism on the nascent ritualism of thirty years ago. Time and study have pruned this devotional exuberance, but he rightly described what he saw. With such performances he had no sympathy; but he loved what he had been accustomed to—the grave and reverend method of worship which was traditional in our cathedrals and college chapels. He communicated by preference at an early service. He revelled in the architecture of our great churches, and enjoyed, though he did not understand, their fine music. And he added one or two little mannerisms of his own, which were clearly intended to mark his love of ecclesiastical proprieties. Thus the present writer remembers that he used, with great solemnity and deliberation, to turn to the east at the Creed in Harrow School Chapel, where the clergy neglected to do so. It was the traditional mode of the Church of England, and that was enough for him. Again, we all know that he described the Athanasian Creed as "Learned science with a strong dash of temper"; yet I remember him saying, with an air of stately admiration, after Service on Ascension Day, "I always like to hear the Athanasian Creed sung. BUT ONE GOD sounds so magnificently, with that full swell of the organ. It seems to come with the whole authority of the Church."

Then again the list of his favourite writers on religious subjects shows exactly the same taste and temper as was shown by his devotional practices—St. Augustine, that "glorious father of the Catholic Church"; "the nameless author of the Imitatio"; Bishop Thomas Wilson, whose Maxims and Sacra he so constantly quoted; Isaac Barrow, whose sermons he used to read to his family on Sunday evenings; Cardinal Newman, to whom he had listened so delightedly in undergraduate days.[58]

To pass from an account of a man's religious sentiment to that of his daily life would in too many cases be an abrupt and even a painful transition; but in the case of Arnold, it is the easiest and most natural in the world. That which he professed he practised, and, as he taught, so he lived. From first to last he was true to his own doctrine that we must cultivate our best self in every department of our being, and be content with nothing less than our predestined perfection. In his character and life, "whatsoever things are lovely" were harmoniously blent.

Before all else he was a worshipper of nature, watching all her changing aspects with a lover-like assiduity, and never happy in a long-continued separation from her. Then his manifold culture and fine taste enabled him to appreciate at its proper value all that is good in high civilization, and yet the unspoilt naturalness of his character found a zest in the most commonplace pleasures of daily existence. Probably Art, whether in music or painting, affected him less than most men of equal cultivation; but there never lived a human being to whom Literature and Society—books and people—taking each word in its most comprehensive sense, yielded a livelier or more constant joy. "Never," as Mr. John Morley said, "shall we know again so blithe and friendly a spirit." As we think of him, the endearing traits come crowding on the memory—his gracious presence, his joy in fresh air and bodily exercise, his merry interest in his friends' concerns, his love of children, his kindness to animals, his absolute freedom from bitterness, rancour, or envy; his unstinted admiration of beauty, or cleverness, his frank enjoyment of light and colour, of a happy phrase, an apt quotation, a pretty room, a well-arranged dinner, a fine vintage; his childlike pleasure in his own performances—"Did I say that? How good that was!"

But all these trifling touches of character-painting, perhaps, tend to overlay and obscure the true portraiture of Matthew Arnold. He was pre-eminently a good man, gentle, generous, enduring, laborious, a devoted husband, a most tender father, an unfailing friend. Qualified by nature and training for the highest honours and successes which the world can give, he spent his life in a long round of unremunerative drudgery, working even beyond the limits of his strength for those whom he loved, and never by word or gesture betraying even a consciousness of that harsh indifference to his gifts and services which stirred the fruitless indignation of his friends. His theology, once the subject of such animated criticism, seems now a matter of little moment; for, indeed, his nature was essentially religious. He was loyal to truth as he knew it, loved the light and sought it earnestly, and by his daily and hourly practice gave sweet and winning illustration of his own doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of human life.

We who were happy enough to fall under his personal influence can never overstate what we owe to his genius and his sympathy. He showed us the highest ideal of character and conduct. He taught us the science of good citizenship. He so interpreted nature that we knew her as we had never known her before. He was our fascinating and unfailing guide in the tangled paradise of literature. And, while for all this we bless his memory, we claim for him the praise of having enlarged the boundaries of the Christian Kingdom by making the lives of men sweeter, brighter, and more humane.

[Footnote 46: A saying attributed to Bishop Wilberforce.]

[Footnote 47: See the Introduction to his Romans, 3rd edition, 1870.]

[Footnote 48: See the Introduction to his Romans, 3rd edition, 1870.]

[Footnote 49: University and other Sermons, p. 175.]

[Footnote 50: W.E. Gladstone: Later Gleanings.]

[Footnote 51: Essays in Criticism. "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment."]

[Footnote 52: J. Armitage Robinson, D.D., Easter Day, 1903.]

[Footnote 53: Edward, 12th Duke of Somerset (1804-1885). Author of Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism.]

[Footnote 54: Literature and Dogma.]

[Footnote 55: Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, pt. i. ch. iii.]

[Footnote 56: Rome and Romanizing. By Arthur Galton.]

[Footnote 57: "Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands," etc.]

[Footnote 58: See p. 61.]



LITERARY LIVES

Edited by W. ROBERTSON NICOLL

* * * * *

Matthew Arnold

By G.W.E. RUSSELL

* * * * *

Extract from Preface:

"It was Arnold's express wish that he should not be made the subject of a Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by which an eminent man is usually commemorated—at once a history of his life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis of his character and opinions. But, though a biography was forbidden, Arnold's family felt sure he would not have objected to the publication of a selection from his correspondence; and it became my happy task to collect, and in some sense to edit, the two volumes of his letters which were published in 1895. The letters, with all their editorial shortcomings (of which I willingly take my full share), constitute the nearest approach to a narrative of Arnold's life which can, consistently with his wishes, be given to the world; and the ground so covered will not be retraversed here. All that literary criticism can do for the honor of his prose and verse has been done already, conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury, affectionately and sympathetically by Mr. Paul, and with varying competence and skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this book I have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens than mine have written, for I wished my judgment to be unbiased by previous verdicts.

"I do not aim at a criticism of the verbal medium through which a great master uttered his heart and mind, but rather at a survey of the effect which he produced on the thought and action of his age."

* * * * *

With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations

$1.00 net (postage, 10 cents)

* * * * *

LITERARY LIVES

* * * * *

Cardinal Newman

By WILLIAM BARRY, D.D.

Author of "The New Antigone," etc.

With photogravure frontispiece and 16 full-page illustrations, $1.00 net (postage, 10 cents)

* * * * *

CONTENTS

I. Early Years. II. The Tractarians. III. First Catholic Period. IV. Apologia pro Vita Sua. V. The Logic of Belief. VI. Dream of Gerontius. VII. The Man of Letters. VIII. Newman's Place in History.

* * * * *

EXTRACT

"In one thing Newman far surpassed Wesley: he was a man of letters equal to the greatest writers of prose his native country had brought forth. The Catholic Reaction of the Nineteenth Century claims its place in literature, thanks to this incomparable talent, side by side with the German mysticism of Carlyle, the devout liberalism of Tennyson, the lyric Utopias of Shelley, and the robust optimism of Browning. Newman is an English classic."

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THE END