nor to be harshly used; but ignorance and insolence these are for certain an unlovely mother and bastard." The mother and the bastard are of Mr. Arnold's kith and kin. It has been our lot to read some of the very worst things that have been said in the very worst way by Voltaire and the Voltairian School; but not even the old fanatic of Ferney was so unbearably impudent as the author of "Literature and Dogma." Let us give a solitary instance. The professor of poetry is speaking of the most Blessed Trinity. He describes the Three Persons thus (p. 306). The Father is, A sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord Shaftesbury, with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice will not allow it; then a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his father, and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who prefers to leave his home to go and live among the race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on condition that his merits shall be counted against their demerits, and that his father's goodness shall be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender shall be admitted to the benefit of it on simply pleading the satisfaction made by the son; and then, finally, a third Lord Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who keeps very much in the background, and works in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously, nevertheless, and who is busy in applying everywhere the benefits of the son's satisfaction and the father's goodness. That is Mr. Arnold's method of describing the Blessed Trinity. And by-and-by when (p. 310) he wishes to be rid of the dogma he relieves himself by saying, "and certainly the fairy tale of the three Lord Shaftesburys no man can verify." And a little further on (p. 312) when he wishes to go a step further and to deny the existence of any personal God whatsoever, he introduces the subject with the words, "the whole difficulty is with the elder Lord Shaftesbury." We have ourselves some regard for light and some regard for sweetness. We know the difficulties the man will meet who seeks a fair measure of either, and we therefore can abstain from blaming Mr. Arnold if his measure of each be small. But Mr. Arnold knows that large masses of his countrymen will regard the language we have quoted as blasphemous and disgusting. Under these circumstances is there in using such language and using it needlessly, any sweetness at all? Mr. Arnold is, as he is fond of saying (and we reverence him for such frequent confession of an unpalatable truth) gifted with no talent of reasoning, no power of following any thought, however simple, through any serious inferential process. But it does not require very exalted powers of reasoning to VOL. XX.-NO. XL. [New Series.] 2 B discover when one is simply impudent. And we really do think that Mr. Arnold is able to see so far. We must, therefore, with, however, all possible sweetness, say he is somewhat to blame. Conscious impudence is, after all, a drawback in a professor of culture. Mr. Arnold's book professes to be an essay towards a better apprehension of the Bible. There may be many, he says, with whom the Bible has small respect; but he is not one of those. He is deeply concerned lest Bible religion should eventually come to nought. He thinks it has almost reached that unfortunate pass, and that unless some one steps in chivalrously to its succour we shall soon have the mortuary columns of the newspapers announcing its doom. Mr. Arnold himself undertakes to be the champion of the Bible. There is just one way of saving it, and that way he adopts. By a process, for which he tells us he is specially suited, he extracts from the sacred volume its sole important truths, and these he commits to a secure immortality in his own everlasting work. The Bible may fail, and is very likely indeed to fail; but the book of Mr. Mathew Arnold, D.C.L., published by Smith, Elder & Co. is imperishable. Our author, therefore, starts with the principle that the right religion is the religion of the Bible. That principle, he says, is admitted by all the Churches, Catholic as well as Protestant, and he adds, with indubitable profundity, that from the nature of the case it must be admitted. He fortifies himself in this very learned position by a quotation. The quotation is given in inverted commas (Preface, viii.), but without reference, and it is ascribed to Dr. Newman. This is the quotation:-"The Bible is the record of the whole revealed faith; so far all parties agree." We have looked for that passage in Dr. Newman's books. We have not found it. It is not a matter of much importance; but at the same time we do not think that Dr. Newman could have written the quoted words after his conversion. We hardly think he could have written them at all. The expression "the Bible is the record of the whole revealed faith," has a haze and an indefiniteness about it very much in the style of Mathew Arnold; but very little in the style of John Henry Newman. But seeing that, according to Roman Catholics, the Bible does not contain all revealed faith; that there are revealed truths which are not in the Bible; it is very plain that if Dr. Newman * "Ecclesia ...... constante rconservavit hoc principium, videlicet esse veritates aliquas revelatas quæ scriptæ non sunt."-Franzelin, "De Traditione et Scripturâ,” p. 214. ever wrote the passage quoted at all, he wrote it before he was an authority on Catholic dogma or Catholic opinion. As we have said, however, the matter is one of the smallest importance. We have only one purpose in mentioning it here. We wish to illustrate for Mr. Arnold how dangerous it is after all to speak with the boldness of ignorance. For Dr. Newman is living still; and Mr. Kingsley has not been heard of greatly since a certain Apologia came to be written. Having settled for himself that the Bible is the place where religion is to be found, Mr. Arnold stops himself, like Dr. Strauss, to ask what religion means. Beyond one point on which he insists vigorously, namely, that dogma has nothing to do with religion, his view of religion is not remarkably well defined. But we shall see by-and-by, that, according to Mr. Arnold, definiteness is the chief of intellectual sins. It is of the essence of everything to resemble the gown of Nora Creina, and the moment a man begins to be accurate, that moment he begins to be wrong. But though Mr. Arnold's notion of religion would hardly stand a Socratic scrutiny, he has a notion of it—and a very original notion indeed. His principles do not allow him to communicate it by definition. But he does better. He communicates it by nods that are quite as good as winks, after the manner of Mr. Browning in Sordello. And he communicates it by examples. Of these latter we shall give the reader a few : By the dispensation of Providence to mankind, goodness gives men most pleasure. That is morality. The path of the just is as a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. That is religion. Live as you were meant to live, is morality. Lay hold on eternal life, is religion. Love not sleep lest thou come to poverty, is morality. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and finish His work, is religion. In fact, Mr. Arnold says religion is morality touched with emotion. Contemplate some moral proposition; wait till it moves you; make some eloquent remark, or utter some excited exclamation, and you have got religion. Religion in reality is chiefly made up of dashes, interjections, and notes of exclamation. Mr. Arnold has therefore discovered both what religion means and that all true religion is found in the Bible. The reader, of course, sees that unless all morality be in the Bible, which is hardly true, these two points can scarcely stand together. But that may be allowed to pass, for these two points are only preliminary to the main business of the book. That main business is the statement of a certain principle and the principle's application. The principle is that only in one peculiar way and by one peculiar class of men can the Bible be rightly understood. The way is to eliminate everything that is not emotional-everything that looks definite or precise, or matter of fact. The class of men who can interpret the Bible must not be scientific, they must not be able reasoners, they must not be men with "a system based on principles interdependent, subordinate and coherent." Analytic power is a curse, and theological expertness an abomination. The men who alone can see what the Bible means are men of culture-whatever that means-men of fair spirit, men of balance, men who have read the best things that have been said and thought since the beginning. A plain person might remark that such very extensive reading of such very good things would require, in order not to be simply ruinous, the very highest powers of mind. But Mr. Arnold does not see this, for Mr. Arnold is not a plain person. Be sure you have culture, be sure you cannot reason, read the classics of the world, and then you can understand the Bible. Of course, it is only Catholic commonplace that no private individual, whatever his endowments, has a right to interpret the Scriptures independently for himself. Of course such interpretation leads and has always led to the most ruinous results. Of course, even before Mr. Arnold's days, not one man in a thousand, not one man in twenty thousand, could securely say that he had the gifts and acquirements necessary for the interpretation of books so various and so difficult as are the Sacred Scriptures. But after Mr. Arnold's days? After "Literature and Dogma" has laid down the law, who can open his Bible with a hope of understanding it any more? Who is it that has this delicate and refined and sensitive culture, this exquisite literary tact and taste, this acquaintance with the best things that have been said and thought in all the world, this fairness that excludes prejudice and the balance that excludes staggering, this affluence of the Zeit-Geist or Time Spirit, which, in common with his German compeers, Mr. Arnold makes so important; and who has all these qualities at the same time, that he is like Mr. Arnold, utterly uncursed with the power of steady consecutive thought? According to Mr. Arnold, no man living fulfils the description but one, and he is an Inspector of National Schools. His name is Mathew Arnold. Professor Huxley, Mr. Darwin, Dr. Newman, Mr. Herbert Spencer, the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester, are spoken of by our author with either undisguised contempt or with a sneering patronage; but Mr. Mathew Arnold is very freely and very frequently put forward as the man of the time. There is no God, he says, but the Stream of Tendency, or the NotOurselves, and not Mahomet but Mathew is his prophet. دو Catholics are of course very little concerned with Mr. Arnold's principle of Scriptural exegesis. They hold that the Bible is infallibly true; Mr. Arnold considers it always fallible and often false. They hold that the Bible is inspired-and we remark for our author's sake that Infallibility and Inspiration are different things;-Mr. Arnold regards Inspiration as simply impossible. It is, therefore, not very interesting to know how Mr. Arnold applies his principle. It is, sooth to say, a little wearisome to follow him in his wanderings; for even the style of "Literature and Dogma is very dreary and nerveless, and what one might call phthisical in the extreme. Painful cough, hollow cheeks, cold sweat on forehead, tottering limbs, eyes glassy and hopeless-that would be the incarnate semblance of Mr. Arnold's new book. In the paper of Mr. Leslie Stephen, which is mentioned at the head of our article, there is much to object to on the score of unfairness; but as a mere piece of literary work it is excellent-strong and clear and direct and trenchant. Mr. Arnold's book has no one good quality that even his best friend can discover. We cannot, therefore, put ourselves or our readers to the trouble of attending him in his application of his principle to the Old and New Testaments. The most we can do is to state briefly a few of the conclusions to which he comes and his manner of making them out. This, we think, will be found extremely curious. To start with the existence of God, whom, as we saw, Mr. Arnold calls the elder Lord Shaftesbury. It is pretty generally admitted that some supreme being exists, who by His power created the world-by His intelligence and volition. rules it. Men have not been able to come to an agreement at any time as to the full nature of this supreme being. But they have very generally agreed that he is an individual with intelligence and will and power; and they have been always accustomed to speak of Him as an intelligent, independent person. That has been the almost universal opinion of men in all times. And if any doubt might arise as to Pagan views of the Deity, no doubt can arise as to Jewish views of the Deity. The God of the Hebrews, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, was very fully described in the Bible. Mr. Arnold goes to the Bible, and the God he finds there is described by him as either he gives us a choice the stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being, or the power not ourselves which makes for righteousness. But what is this stream, and what is this power? Mr. Arnold cannot say what either of them is; but he can say what either of them is not. The power not ourselves is not a person. It is not an |