Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden's grim narrative of

seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley's

"conscientiousness," Arnold says, with honest indignation, "After

reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of

irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human

inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human

power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's

abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her

and defence of himself afterwards."

In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so

strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the

"ideal Shelley," "the delightful Shelley," "the friend of the

unfriended poor," the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery

of the medium of sounds, and the "natural magic in his rhythm." But then

he adds this salutary caution: "Let no one suppose that a want of humour

and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's

poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and

Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either." In poetry, as in life, he

is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."

And just as, in Arnold's view, moral defects in an author were apt to

mar the perfection of his work, so an author's moral virtues might

ennoble and enlarge his authorship. Hear him on his friend Arthur

Clough: "He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable

literary qualities: a true sense for his object of study, and a

single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more

eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means

of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the

most undivided and disinterested love for the object in itself, the

greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal.

His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so

rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of

littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which

the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities,

offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his

friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor

praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction

that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem,

_The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich_, has some admirable Homeric

qualities--out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity.

Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with

the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the

Homeric simplicity of his literary life."

We have seen more than once that, according to Arnold, poetry was a

criticism of life; but he always maintained that this was true of poetry

only because poetry is part of literature, and all literature was a

criticism of life. One may demur to the statement as greatly too

unguarded in its terms, but certainly he was true to his own doctrine,

and in practice, from first to last, he used literature as a medium for

criticising the life and conduct of his fellow-men. In the last year of

his life he produced with approbation "a favourite saying of Ptolemy the

astronomer, which Bacon quotes in its Latin version thus:--_Quum fini

appropinquas, bonum cum augmento operare_"--"As you draw near to your

latter end, redouble your efforts to do good." And this redoubled effort

was in his case all of a piece with what had gone before. In 1863 he

wrote to a friend: "In trying to heal the British demoniac, true

doctrine is not enough; one must convey the true doctrine with studied

moderation; for, if one commits the least extravagance, the poor madman

seizes hold of this, tears and rends it, and quite fails to perceive

that you have said anything else."

All his literary life was spent in trying to convey "true doctrine with

studied moderation." And in his true doctrine nothing was more

conspicuous than his insistence, early and late, on the supreme

importance of character and conduct. The first object of life was to

realize one's best self, and this endeavour required not merely

cleverness or information: even genius would not of itself suffice;

still less would adherence to any particular body of opinions. If a man

was _dis-respectable_, "not even the merit of not being a Philistine

could make up for it." Character issuing in Conduct--this was the true

culture which we must all ensue, if by any means we were to attain to

our predestined perfection; and, if that were once secured, all the

rest--talent, fame, influence, length of days, worldly

prosperity--mattered little. Thus he wrote of his friend Edward

Quillinan--

I saw him sensitive in frame,

I knew his spirits low:

And wish'd him health, success, and fame--

I do not wish it now.

For these are all their own reward,

And leave no good behind;

They try us, oftenest make us hard,

Less modest, pure, and kind.

Alas! yet to the suffering man,

In this his mortal state,

Friends could not give what fortune can--

Health, ease, a heart elate.

But he is now by fortune foil'd

No more; and we retain

The memory of a man unspoil'd,

Sweet, generous, and humane--

With all the fortunate have not,

With gentle voice and brow.

--Alive, we would have changed his lot,

We would not change it now.

When his eldest boy died he wrote to a friend: "He is gone--and all the

absorption in one's own occupations which prevented one giving to him

more than moments, all one's occasional impatience, all one's taking his

ailments as a matter of course, come back upon one as something

inconceivable and inhuman. And his mother, who has nothing of all this

to reproach herself with, who was everything to him and would have given

herself for him, has lost the occupation of sixteen years, and has to

begin life over again. The one endless comfort to us is the thought of

the _sweet, firm, sterling character_ which the darling child developed

in and by all his sufferings and privations. Of that we can think and

think."

When his second boy died he said that his "deepest feeling" was best

expressed by his own _Dejaneira_--

But him, on whom, in the prime

Of life, with vigour undimm'd,

With unspent mind, and a soul

_Unworn, undebased, undecay'd_,

Mournfully grating, the gates

Of the city of death have for ever closed--

_Him_, I count _him_ well-starr'd.

In teaching the high lesson of Character and Conduct, he dealt sparingly

in words, even words of "studied moderation." He taught principally, he

taught conspicuously, he taught all his life long, by Example. In

regarding that example, as it stands clear across the interspace of

fifteen years, we are reminded of Tertullian's doctrine concerning the

_anima naturaliter Christiana_. A more genuinely amiable man never

lived. His sunny temper, his quick sympathy, his inexhaustible fun,

were natural gifts. But something more than nature must have gone to

make his constant unselfishness, his manly endurance of adverse fate,

his noble cheerfulness under discouraging circumstances, his buoyancy in

breasting difficulties, his unremitting solicitude for the welfare and

enjoyment of those who stood nearest to his heart. The secret of his

life was that he had taken pains with his own character. While he was

still quite young we find him bewailing the "worldly element which

enters so largely into his composition," and which threatens to make a

gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, associations of his

youth. "But," he says in writing to his sister, "as Thomas à Kempis

recommended, _frequentur tibi violentiam fac_ ... so I intend not to

give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war

against it till it ceases to isolate me from you, and leaves me with the

power to discern and adopt the good which you have and I have not."

The result of this self-discipline and self-culture was to produce in

him all the virtues which are supposed to be specifically and peculiarly

Christian. "Christianity," said Bishop Creighton, "impressed the Roman

world by its power of producing men who were strong in self-control, and

this must always be its contribution to the world." Arnold's

self-control was absolute and unshakable; and to self-control he added

the characteristically Christian virtues of surrender, placability,

readiness to forgive injuries, perfect freedom from envy, hatred, and

malice. He revered the "method and secret of Jesus"; he did all honour

to His "mildness and sweet reasonableness." "Christianity," he said, "is

Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile

affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity

to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with

moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired

self-sacrifice; to men who refuse themselves nothing it showed one who

refused himself everything." Following this example, Arnold preached

"Grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self," and what he

preached he practised. "Kindness and Pureness," he said, "Charity and

Chastity. If any virtues could stand for the whole of Christianity,

these might. Let us have them from the mouth of Jesus Christ Himself.

'He that loveth his life shall lose it; a new commandment give I unto

you, that ye love one another.' There is charity. 'Blest are the pure in

heart, for they shall see God.' There is purity." Charity was indeed the

law of Arnold's life. He loved with a passionate and persistent love. He

loved his wife with increasing devotion as years went on, when she had

become "my sweet Granny," and they both felt that "we are too old for

separations." He loved with equal fondness his mother (whom in his

brightness, fun, and elasticity he closely resembled), the sisters who

so keenly shared his intellectual tastes, his children living and

departed. "Dick[34] was a tower of strength." "Lucy[35] is such a

perfect companion." "Nelly[36] is the dearest girl in the world." "That

little darling[4] we have left behind us at Laleham; and he will soon

fade out of people's remembrance, but _we_ shall remember him as long as

we live, and he will be one more bond between us, even more perhaps in

his death than in his sweet little life." "It was exactly a year since

we had driven to Laleham with darling Tommy[38] and the other two boys

to see Basil's[37] grave; and now we went to see _his_ grave, poor

darling." "I cannot write Budge's[39] name without stopping to look at

it in stupefaction at his not being alive."

Outside the circle of his family, his affection was widely bestowed and

faithfully maintained. He had the true genius of friendship, and when

he signed himself "affectionately" it meant that he really loved.

Enmities he had none. If ever he had suffered injuries they were

forgiven, forgotten, and buried out of sight. Even in the controversies

where his strongest convictions were involved, he steadily abstained

from bitterness, violence, and detraction. "Fiery hatred and malice," he

said, with perfect truth, "are what I detest, and would always allay or

avoid if I could."

In the preface to his _Last Essays on the Church and Religion_, he takes

those two great lessons of the Christian Gospel--Charity and

Chastity--and goes on to show how they illustrate "the _natural truth_

of Christianity," as distinct from any considerations of Revelation or

Law. "Now, really," he says, writing in 1877, "if there is a lesson

which in our day has come to force itself upon everybody, in all

quarters and by all channels, it is the lesson of the _solidarity_, as

it is called by modern philosophers, of men. If there was ever a notion

tempting to common human nature, it was the notion that the rule of

'every man for himself' was the rule of happiness. But at last it turns

out as a matter of experience, and so plainly that it is coming to be

even generally admitted--it turns out that the only real happiness is in

a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts

with a man as essential to his own. He that loves his life does really

turn out to lose it, and the new commandment proves its own truth by

experience."

And then he goes on to what he justly calls "the other great Christian

virtue, Pureness." When he was thirty-two, he had written--"The lives

and deaths of the 'pure in heart' have, perhaps, the privilege of

touching us more deeply than those of others--partly, no doubt, because

with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually

great. However, with them one feels--even I feel--that for their

purity's sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have

wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they

shall undoubtedly, in some sense or other, see God." And now,

twenty-three years later, he returns to the same theme. Science, he

says, is beginning to throw doubts on the "truth and validity of the

Christian idea of Pureness." There can be no more vital question for

human society. On the side of _natural truth_, experience must decide.

"But," he says, "finely-touched souls have a presentiment of a thing's

natural truth, even though it be questioned, and long before the

palpable proof by experience convinces all the world. They have it quite

independently of their attitude towards traditional religion.... All

well-inspired souls will perceive the profound natural truth of the

idea of pureness, and will be sure, therefore, that the more boldly it

is challenged the more sharply and signally will experience mark its

truth. So that of the two great Christian virtues, charity and chastity,

kindness and pureness, the one has at this moment the most signal

testimony from experience to its intrinsic truth and weight, and the

other is expecting it."

Again, in _God and the Bible_, he has a most instructive passage on the

relation of the sexes. "Here," he says, "we are on ground where to walk

right is of vital concern to men, and where disasters are plentiful." He

speculates on that relation as it may be supposed to have subsisted in

the first ages of the human race, and tries to trace it down to the

point of time "where history and religion begin." "And at this point we

first find the Hebrew people, with polygamy still clinging to it as a

survival from the times of ignorance, but with the marriage-tie solidly

established, strict and sacred, as we see it between Abraham and Sara.

Presently this same Hebrew people, with that aptitude which

characterized it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order,

placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn

sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment: _Thou shalt not

commit adultery_." And again: "Such was Israel's genius for the ideas

of moral order and of right, such his intuition of the Eternal that

makes for righteousness, that he felt without a shadow of a doubt, and

said with the most impressive solemnity, that Free Love was--to speak,

again, like our modern philosopher--fatal to progress. _He knoweth not

that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of

hell._"

The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold

declared that his _Discourses in America_ was the book by which, of all

his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever

he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight,

for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and

Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.

When the odious Voltaire urged his followers to "Crush the Infamous," he

had in mind that virtue which is specially characteristic of

Christianity.[40] A century later Renan said: "Nature cares nothing for

chastity." _Les frivoles out peutêtre raison_--"The gay people are

perhaps in the right." Against this doctrine of devils Arnold uttered a

protesting and a warning voice. He was--heaven knows!--no enemy to

France. All that is best in French literature and French life he admired

almost to excess. His sympathy with France was so keen that Sainte-Beuve

wrote to him--"Vous avez traversé notre vie et notre littérature par une

ligne intérieure, profonde, qui fait les initiés, et que vous ne perdrez

jamais." But in spite of, perhaps because of, this sympathy with France,

he felt himself bound to protest and to warn.

Addressing his American audience in November, 1883, he pointed out the

dangers which England, Ireland, America, and France incur through

habitual disregard, in each case, of some virtue or grace without which

national perfection is impossible. He used, as a kind of text for his

discourse, the famous passage from the Philippians. "Whatsoever things

are true, whatsoever things are elevated, whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever

things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any

praise, have these in your mind, let your thoughts run upon these."

_Whatsoever things are pure_. [Greek: osa hagua]--thus the teacher of

Culture moralized on this pregnant phrase.

[Illustration: The Union Rooms, Oxford

At the Jubilee of the Union, 1873, Matthew Arnold responded to Dr.

Liddon's speech proposing 'Literature'

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

"The question was once asked by the Town Clerk of Ephesus: 'What man is

there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a

worshipper of the great goddess Diana?' Now really, when one looks at

the popular literature of the French at this moment--their popular

novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers--and at the life of

which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a

goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the Town Clerk of

Ephesus, to ask: 'What man is there that knoweth not how that the city

of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity?' Or

rather, as Greek is the classic and euphonious language for names of

gods and goddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and

call her the goddess Aselgeia. That goddess has always been a sufficient

power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need

restraining rather than encouraging. But here is now a whole people,

law, literature, nay, and art too, at her service! Stimulations and

suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn.... 'Nature,'

cries M. Renan, 'cares nothing about chastity.' What a slap in the face

to the sticklers for 'Whatsoever things are pure'!... Even though a

gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion

in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about

chastity, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great

goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast and say that her worship is against

nature--human nature--and that it is ruin. For this is the test of its

being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin. And the

test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests in such

matters there may be. For, if you allege that it is the will of God that

we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you that they do

not know any such person. And in like manner, if it is said that those

who serve the goddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the Kingdom of God, the

Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any such place. But

that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes that the service

of the goddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are marred and

stunted by it, and disqualified for the ideal society of the future, is

an infallible test to employ.

"The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things

are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato

tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that

by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the

man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble

distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his

precise way: that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice

have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the

understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other

vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.' True; and, once admitted

and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be

brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and

insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows till it ends by

exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the

man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service

of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with

emotion by any language except Fustian. Such are the fruits of the

worship of the great goddess Aselgeia.

"So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us

say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal.... The

Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of

States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she

has a most dangerous moral disease."

In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas

and its spiritual significance:

"When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it

celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the

Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the

manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of

the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the

manifestation of this virtue in Jesus."

"That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our

attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus

His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did

homage--pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did

homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue

of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned

and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a

necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."

So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most

important department of human conduct, Arnold's influence, to use his

own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness

unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme

value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what

old-fashioned theologians would have called a "hedge of the law."[41] In

season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would

forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and

all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it,

with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe,

perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a

protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment

that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the

sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping

such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these

conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to

laxity, he was the unsparing foe.

It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have

travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if

we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and

Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had

the Divorce Court for its centre. Arnold writes as follows: "We had ----

with us one day. He was quite full of the Lord Palmerston scandal,

which your charming newspaper, the _Star_--that true reflection of the

rancour of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the vulgarity,

meddlesomeness, and grossness of the British multitude--has done all it

could to spread abroad. It was followed yesterday by the _Standard_, and

is followed to-day by the _Telegraph_. Happy people, in spite of our bad

climate and cross tempers, with our penny newspapers!"

The admirable satire of _Friendship's Garland_ is constantly levelled

against national aberrations in this direction. In the year 1870 there

was a fashionable divorce-case, more than usually scandalous, and the

disgusting narrative had been followed with keen interest by those who

look up at the Aristocracy as men look up at the stars. In reference to

this case, he quotes to his imaginary friend Arminius the noble

sentiment of Barrow: "Men will never be heartily loyal and submissive to

authority till they become really good; nor will they ever be very good

till they see their leaders such." To which Arminius replies, in his

thoughtful manner: "Yes, that is what makes your Lord C----s so

inexpressibly precious!" A certain Lord C----, be it observed, having

figured very conspicuously in the trial.

With reference to the enormous publicity given in England to such

malefic matter, Arnold says to Arminius: "When a Member of Parliament

wanted to abridge the publicity given to the M---- case, the Government

earnestly reminded him that it had been the solemn decision of the House

of Commons that all the proceedings of the Divorce Court should be as

open as the day. When there was a suggestion to hear the B---- case in

private, the upright magistrate who was appealed to said firmly that he

could never trifle with the public mind in that manner. All this was as

it should be. So far, so good. But was the publicity in these cases

perfectly full and entire? Were there not some places which the details

did not reach? There were few, but there were some. And this, while the

Government has an organ of its own, the _London Gazette_, dull,

high-priced, and of comparatively limited circulation! I say, make the

price of the _London Gazette_ a halfpenny; change its name to the

_London Gazette and Divorce Intelligencer_; let it include besides

divorce news, all cases whatever that have an interest of the same

nature for the public mind; distribute it _gratis_ to mechanics'

institutes, workmen's halls, seminaries for the young (these latter more

especially), and then you will be giving the principle of publicity a

full trial. This is what I often say to Arminius; and, when he looks

astounded, I reassure him with a sentence which, I know very well, the

moment I make it public will be stolen by the Liberal newspapers. But it

is getting near Christmas-time, and I do not mind making them a present

of it. It is this: _The spear of freedom, like that of Achilles, has the

power to heal the wounds which itself makes_."

In _Friendship's Garland_, from the very structure of the book, his

serious judgments have to be delivered by the mouth of his Prussian

friend; and here is his judgment on our public concessions to

pruriency--"By shooting all this garbage on your public, you are

preparing and assuring for your English people an immorality as deep and

wide as that which destroys the Latin nations."

But his "hedge of the law" had other thorns besides those with which he

pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature. He had shrewd

sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify "that double

craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently

exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth--the craving

for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality." He poured scorn on

the newspapers which glorified "the great sexual insurrection of the

Anglo-Teutonic race," and the author who extolled the domestic life of

Mormonism. "Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love

and Marriage--such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these

matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion." He thus

forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871. "Mr. T.

Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which

I have had some prejudices--the Bill for enabling a man to marry his

deceased wife's sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious

Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a

salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters

connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose

immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of

Puritanism to see life." All these various attempts to break down the

"hedge of the law" received in turn their merited condemnation; but

always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to

the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife's sister. Thus the

imaginary leader-writer of the _Daily Telegraph_ summarizes the

controversy: "Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles' liberty, his Christian

liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this

manner? And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task

of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to

the 'sexual insurrection' of our race? Why are its poor devoted

ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian

liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, _pour encourager les

autres_? Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire

and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred? Why is

it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in

Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain--

Which gives us manners, freedom, virtue, power?

Why must ideas on this topic have to be incubated for years in that

'nest of spicery,' as the divine Shakespeare says, the mind of Mr. T.

Chambers, before they can rule the world? For my own part, my resolve is

formed. This great question shall henceforth be seriously taken up in

Fleet Street. As a sop to those toothless old Cerberuses the bishops,

who impotently exhibit still the passions of another age, we will accord

the continuance of the prohibition which forbids a man to marry his

grandmother. But in other directions there shall be freedom. Mr.

Chambers' admirable Bill for enabling a woman to marry her sister's

husband will doubtless pass triumphantly through Committee to-night,

amidst the cheers of the Ladies' Gallery. The Liberal Party must

supplement that Bill by two others: one enabling people to marry their

brothers' and sisters' children, the other enabling a man to marry his

brother's wife."

There is perhaps no social mischief which Arnold attacked so

persistently as the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife's sister.

The most passionate advocates of that "enfranchising measure" will

scarcely think that his hostility was due to what John Bright so

gracefully called "ecclesiastical rubbish." Councils and Synods, Decrees

and Canons, were held by him in the lightest esteem. The formal side of

Religion--the side of dogma and doctrine and rule and definition--had no

attractions for him, and no terrors. He never dreamed that the Table of

Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law. His appeal in

these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius

of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna."

And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the

clergyman who wrote to the _Guardian_ about incest, though indeed he

expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and

everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical"

method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and

understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments

from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between _malum per se_ and _malum

prohibitum_. The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong

sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the

customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won,

painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive

life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take

a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral

virtue--that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson

said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, assured

him that the "great sexual insurrection" was not merely a grotesque

phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster,

and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest

resistance must be offered. Here again his love of coherence and logical

symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the

true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere

attempts to say _Thus far and no farther_. He knew that all the laws of

Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can

be alleged against marriage with a husband's brother which does not tell

against marriage with a wife's sister. Yet again he regarded the

proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more

full-blooded Philistines--

Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors,[42]--

who, trying to keep a foot in each world of legality and indulgence,

sought patronage from the rich and deceived and exploited the poor.

Certainly not the least of his objections to the "enfranchising measure"

was that, in breaking down the hedge of the law, it invaded Delicacy;

and whatever invaded delicacy helped to precipitate gross though perhaps

unforeseen evils. Unfortunately there are great masses--whole

classes--of people to whom delicacy, whether in speech or act, means

nothing. To eat, drink, sleep, buy and sell, marry and be given in

marriage, is for those masses the ideal and the law of life. These

things granted, they desire no more: any restriction on them, any

refinement of them, they dislike and resent. In another place[43] we

have cited the mysterious effect produced upon the Paris Correspondent

of the _Daily Telegraph_ by the sudden sound of the word "Delicacy." And

that word was uttered in connexion with the "enfranchising measure." "If

legislation on this subject were impeded by the party of bigotry, if

they chose not to wait for it, if they got married without it, and if

you were to meet them on the boulevard at Paris during their wedding

tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: 'Mr. Bottles, you are a

profligate man!' Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly

from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: 'But will any one dare to call

him a man of delicacy?' The question was so utterly unpractical that I

took no note of it whatever, and should not have mentioned it if it had

not been for its extraordinary effect upon our Paris Correspondent....

My friend Nick, who has all the sensitive temperament of genius, seemed

inexplicably struck by this word _delicacy_, which he kept repeating to

himself. 'Delicacy,' said he--'delicacy--surely I have heard that word

before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh

enthusiastic youth; before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal

paper, before I called Dixon's style lithe and sinewy--' 'Collect

yourself, my friend,' laying my hand on his shoulder; 'you are unmanned.

But in mentioning Dixon you redouble my strength; for you bring to my

mind the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race, and the

master-spirit which guides it.'"[44]

But in matters far outside the region of marriage, that word

"delicacy," which so powerfully affected the Paris correspondent, is the

key to a great deal of what Arnold felt and wrote. In the sphere of

conduct he set up, as we have seen, two supreme objects for veneration

and attainment: Chastity and Charity. He practised them, he taught them,

and he used them as decisive tests of what was good and what was bad in

national life. But plainly there are large tracts of existence which lie

outside the purview of these two virtues. There is the domain of

honesty, integrity, and fair dealing; there is a loyalty to truth, the

pursuit of conscience at all costs and hazards; there is all that is

contained in the idea of beauty, propriety, and taste. None of these are

touched by charity or chastity. For example, a man may have an

unblemished life and a truly affectionate heart; and yet he may be

incorrigible in money-matters, or be ready to sacrifice principle to

convenience, or, like our great Middle Class generally, may be serenely

content with hideousness and bad manners.

Now in all these departments of human life, less important indeed than

the two chiefest, but surely not unimportant, Arnold applied the

criterion of delicacy. "A finely-touched nature," he said, "will respect

in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty....

The worship of sharp bargains is fatal to delicacy; nor is that missing

grace restored by accompanying the sharp bargain with an exhibition of

fine sentiments." Then, again, as regards loyalty to conviction, he knew

full well that, in Newman's phrase, he might "have saved himself many a

scrape, if he had been wise enough to hold his tongue." "The thought of

you," he wrote to Mr. Morley, "and of one or two other friends, was

often present to me in America, and, no doubt, contributed to make me

hold fast to 'the faith once delivered to the Saints.'" The slightest

deviation from the line of clear conviction--the least turning to left

or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter

a class, showed a want of delicacy--a preference of present popularity

to permanent self-respect--which he could never have indulged in

himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others. He had nothing but

contempt for "philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with

the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn." And then,

again, in the whole of that great sphere which belongs to Beauty,

Propriety, and Taste, his sense of delicacy was always at work, and not

seldom in pain. "Ah," he exclaimed, quoting from Rivarol, "no one

considers how much pain any man of taste has to suffer, before ever he

inflicts any." To inflict pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to

suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting

against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for

sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the

ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of

English life. "The [Greek: euphnês] is the man who turns towards

sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnês] on the other hand is our

Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless

he can give _light_." "Oxford by her ineffable charm keeps ever calling

us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to

_beauty_." In his constant quest for these glorious things--beauty,

colour, sweetness, and light,--his sense of delicacy had much to

undergo; for, in the class with which he was by the work of his life

brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only class

where "elegance and refinement, beauty and grace" were found, was

inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his

doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for

"living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of 'Marine

Retreat'"; another, preaching that "a piano in a Quaker's drawing-room

is a step for him to more humane life;" and again "liking and respecting

polite tastes in a grandee," when Lord Ravensworth consulted him

about Latin verses. "At present far too many of Lord Ravensworth's class

are mere men of business, or mere farmers, or mere horse-racers, or mere

men of pleasure." That was a consummation which delicacy in the

Aristocratic class would make impossible. To cultivate in oneself, and

apply in one's conduct, this instinct of delicacy, was a lesson which no

one, who fell under Arnold's influence, could fail to learn. He taught

us to "liberate the gentler element in oneself," to eschew what was base

and brutal, unholy and unkind. He taught us to seek in every department

of life for what was "lovely and of good report," tasteful, becoming,

and befitting; to cultivate "man's sense for beauty, and man's instinct

for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners." He taught us to

plan our lives, as St. Paul taught the Corinthians to plan their

worship, [Greek: euschmnonôs kai kata taxin],"--in right, graceful, or

becoming figure, and by fore-ordered arrangement."[45] Alike his

teaching and his example made us desire (however imperfectly we attained

our object) to perceive in all the contingencies and circumstances of

life exactly the line of conduct which would best consist with Delicacy,

and so to make virtue victorious by practising it attractively.

[Illustration: Matthew Arnold, 1880

_From the Painting by G.F. Watts, R.A._

_Photo F. Hollyer_]

[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.'"

[Illustration: Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, from the Lawn]

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.

[Illustration: Matthew Arnold, 1884

_Photo Elliott & Fry_]

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 Eugénie 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. Fontanès--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.

[Illustration: The Grave in Laleham Churchyard

Where Matthew Arnold, his wife, and three sons are buried

_Photo Ralph Lane_]

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 Mediæval 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."

* * * * *