Mr. Arnold’s lay sermon to “the sacrificed classes” at Whitechapel
contrasts doubly with the pulpit sermons which we too often hear. It
is real where these sermons are unreal, and frankly unreal where these
sermons are real. It does honestly warn the people to whom it was
addressed, of the special danger to which “the sacrificed classes” are
exposed, whenever they in their turn get the upper-hand, the danger of
simply turning the tables on the great possessing and aspiring classes.
“If the sacrificed classes,” he said, “under the influence of hatred,
cupidity, desire of change, destroy, in order to possess and enjoy in
their turn, their work, too, will be idolatrous, and the old work will
continue to stand for the present, or at any rate their new work will
not take its place.” It must be work done in a new spirit, not in the
spirit of hatred or cupidity, or eagerness to enjoy and appropriate
the privileges of others, which can alone stand the test of time and
judgment. So far, Mr. Arnold was much more real than too many of our
clerical preachers. He warned his hearers against a temptation which
he knew would be stirring constantly in their hearts, and not against
abstract temptations which he had no reason to think would have any
special significance to any of his audience.
On the other hand, if he were more real in what was addressed to his
particular audience than pulpit-preachers often are, he resorted once
more, with his usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words
and the principles of true literature, to that practice of debasing
the coinage of religious language, and using great sayings in a new
and washed-out sense of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom
guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold’s is the only great set-off against
the brilliant services he has rendered to English literature, but
it is one which we should not find it easy to condemn too strongly.
Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr. Arnold has tried
to “verify” the teaching of the Bible, while depriving the name of
God of all personal meaning; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while
denying that Christ had any message to us from a world beyond our own;
and even,—wildest enterprise of all,—so to rationalise the strictly
theological language of St. John as to rob it of all its theological
significance. Well, we do not charge this offence on Mr. Arnold as in
any sense whatever an attempt to play fast-and-loose with words; for he
has again and again confessed to all the world, with the explicitness
and vigor which are natural to him, the precise drift of his
enterprise. But we do charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest
possible sense a great literary misdemeanor, that he has lent his
high authority to the attempt to give to a great literature a pallid,
faded, and artificial complexion, though, with his view of it, his
duty obviously was to declare boldly that that literature teaches
what is, in his opinion, false and superstitious, and deserves our
admiration only as representing a singularly grand, though obsolete,
stage in man’s development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and honest as the
day. But frank and honest as he is, his authority is not the less lent
to a non-natural rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable
than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles
which once brought down the wrath of the world of Protestants on the
author of “Tract 90.” In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells his
hearers that in the “preternatural and miraculous aspect” which the
popular Christianity assumes Christianity is not solid or verifiable,
but that there is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and
verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a preternatural
[_i. e._, supernatural] world at all. Then he goes on, after eulogising
Mr. Watts’s pictures,—of one of which a great mosaic has been set up
in Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett’s noble work there,—to
remark that good as it is to bring home to “the less refined classes”
the significance of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that
“whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,” and to suggest,
of course, by implication, that there is a living water springing up to
everlasting life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst. Then he
proceeds thus:—
“No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for
Beauty, the pleasure of Art, if left merely by
themselves, if untouched by what is the deepest
thing in human life—religion—are apt to become
ineffectual and superficial. The art which Mr.
Barnett has done his best to make known to the
people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts, the art
manifested in works such as that which has just now
been unveiled upon the walls of St. Jude’s Church,
has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You
have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the
scroll which is attached to it. There is the
figure of Time, a strong young man, full of hope,
energy, daring, and adventure, moving on to take
possession of life; and opposite to him there is
that beautiful figure of Death, representing the
breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling
disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from
which the fullest life and the most fiery energy
cannot exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young
man, that mournful figure must go hand in hand with
him for ever. And those two figures, let us admit if
you like, belong to Art. But who is that third figure
whose scale weighs deserts, and who carries a sword
of fire? We are told again by the text printed on the
scroll, ‘The Eternal [the scroll, however, has ‘the
Lord’] is a God of Judgment; blessed are they that
wait for him.’ It is the figure of Judgment, and that
figure, I say, belongs to religion. The text which
explains the figure is taken from one of the Hebrew
Prophets; but an even more striking text is furnished
us from that saying of the Founder of Christianity
when he was about to leave the world, and to leave
behind him his Disciples, who, so long as he lived,
had him always to cling to, and to do all their
thinking for them. He told them that when he was gone
they should find a new source of thought and feeling
opening itself within them, and that this new source
of thought and feeling should be a comforter to them,
and that it should convince, he said, the world of
many things. Amongst other things, he said, it should
convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the
Prince of this world is judged. That is a text which
we shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with
and alongside that text from the Prophet. More and
more it is becoming manifest that the Prince of this
world is really judged, that that Prince who is the
perpetual ideal of selfishly possessing and enjoying,
and of the worlds fashioned under the inspiration of
this ideal, is judged. One world and another have
gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the
inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling
and edifying thought.”
Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him
“the Eternal” means nothing more than that “stream of tendency,
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that “Judgment”
means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set
themselves against this stream of tendency, if the stream of tendency
be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we
do not think that the consoling character of this text will be keenly
felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to
Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should
“reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of
sin because they believed not on me, of righteousness because I go
to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment because the prince
of this world is judged,” we should understand this as importing,
to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some
unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ’s death,
which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new
vision of Christ’s holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that
“stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,”
in which Christ’s own personality would then be merged; and further,
that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all
institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle
to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in
this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing
else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive
significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature
depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds
the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires
the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the
hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s
disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute
for a faith such as this, a belief—to our minds the wildest in the
world, and the least verifiable—that “a stream of tendency” effects
all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least so much of it as
ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his
complete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplishing
posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that
he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of
God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept
the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold
for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying
to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power
depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. “The Eternal”
means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought
and will and life; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when
it means nothing but a select “stream of tendency” which is assumed,
for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious.
“Living water” means one thing when it means the living stream of God’s
influence; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that
which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow
of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme
righteousness; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the
sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth
why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his
own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere
literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up
this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in
words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for
which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. “Solidity and
verification,” indeed! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in
it and less pretence of verification than his; but be that as it may,
he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as different
from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the
substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon
on “Unreal Words”? If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and
remember the warning addressed to those who “use great words and
imitate the sentences of others,” and who “fancy that those whom they
imitate had as little meaning as themselves,” or “perhaps contrive to
think that they themselves have a meaning adequate to their words.” It
is to us impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged
such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the great
faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which
absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a “stream of tendency”
on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting
Literature,—of which he is so great a master,—to shame, when he
travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of
our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and
withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great
words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them
as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold’s readings of Scriptures are the
spiritual _assignats_ of English faith.—_Spectator._