deal in the hope of saving the rest. The proposition that "the God of the Universe is a Person" he set aside as unprofitable and mischievous. God was the Eternal, and the Eternal was the enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness. Therefore Mr. Arnold, in quoting the Bible, substituted "the Eternal" for "the Lord," which he regarded, Heaven knows why, as meaning "a magnified and non-natural man." The effect upon the ordinary reader, who knows the Authorised Version almost by heart, is like suddenly swallowing a fish-bone. Mr. Arnold seems to have been pleased with "the Eternal" from the mouths of boys and girls in the Jewish schools he inspected. But he forgot that, to say nothing of other considerations, in stately and rhythmical English three syllables are very different from one. "Der Aberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens," said Goethe; -"Extra belief is the Poetry of Life." Mr. Arnold, who cites this passage with approval, nevertheless proposes to get rid of the poetry by the rationalism of faith. He points out that a belief in the nearness of the Second Advent was universal among early Christians, including the Apostles, and that some of the words attributed to Christ can hardly be construed in any other sense. He shows that St. Paul interpreted Hebrew prophecy in a manner which will not bear examination, that Christ was far above His reporters, who may possibly have misunderstood Him, and that the Zeit-Geist, the Time-Spirit, has made belief in miracles impossible. "The Kingdom of God is within you was the essence of the true gospel. The method and secret of Jesus were repentance and peace. He "restored the intuition" which belonged to Israel, though what this

intuition is does not very clearly appear. "God is a spirit" means "God is an influence," the influence which preserves us against faults of temper, and faults. of sensuality. The supposed variance between St. Paul and St. James is a mistake (here Mr. Arnold becomes unexpectedly orthodox). Works without faith are as futile as faith without works. "Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but the keeping of the Commandments of God."

To all which it may of course be said, that Mr. Arnold could not pick and choose. Christ's teaching must be taken as a whole, or as we have it. If He did not say, "Go ye and teach all nations," how do we know that He said, "I am the resurrection and the life"? If He did not say, "Destroy this temple, and I will build it again in three days," how do we know that He said, "Blessed are the meek"? Once begin to tamper with the record, and you saw the branch on which you are sitting between yourself and the tree. According to this emphatic and uncritical but not illogical creed, the whole of the New Testament must stand or fall together. The resurrection cannot indeed be put on the same footing as the crucifixion, because the crucifixion is in Tacitus. The miracle of the Gadarene swine cannot be bracketed with the Sermon on the Mount, because the Sermon on the Mount must have been composed by some one, though the swine never existed at all, or never left their pastures. But unless we believe that Christ said exactly what is attributed to Him in the gospels at the precise time and in the precise place there given, we must regard Him as a purely mythical personage. Mr. Arnold would have replied that Christ did not speak Greek,

the most metaphysical, but Aramaic, the plainest of languages; that ideas have therefore been imputed to Him which He never intended; that the authority of the sayings reported to have been uttered after His death cannot be as high as if that event had not occurred; that both the date and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel are obscure; and that it is a function of true criticism to reject particular expressions inconsistent with ascertained character or style. He might have materially strengthened his position (I do not say that he would have established it) by a comparison of Christianity and Buddhism as they originally were with what they afterwards became.

Some of Mr. Arnold's judgments are remarkably penetrating and shrewd. Such, for instance, is the description of Frederick Maurice, "that pure and devout spirit, of whom, however, the truth must at last be said, that in theology he passed his life beating the bush with deep emotion, and never starting the hare." So, too, of the three creeds. It may be irreverent, but it is exceedingly clever from Mr. Arnold's point of view, to call them popular science, learned science, and learned science with a strong dash of temper. To Mr. Arnold all creeds were anathema. He could not away with them. The Apostles' was as bad as the Nicene, and the Nicene no better than the Athanasian. Yet that he never lost his hold upon vital religion is surely clear from the fine passage on the 102nd page of the first edition, where he says that though religion makes for men's happiness, it does not rest upon that as a motive, but "finds a far surer ground in personal devotion to Christ, who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a passage for it into their hearts;

in believing that Christ is come from God, following Christ, loving Christ. And in the happiness which this believing in Him, following Him, and loving Him gives, it finds the mightiest of sanctions." Literature and Dogma never rises to the level of Ecce Homo either in substance or in style. It is less high, less deep, less penetrating, less sympathetic. But its moral and intellectual honesty is stamped upon every page.

The storm which raged round Literature and Dogma found an echo even in the family circle. He had to defend himself to his sister Fanny, and he did so in words as unquestionably dignified as they are obviously sincere. "There is a levity," he says (Letters, vol. ii. page 120), "which is altogether evil; but to treat miracles and the common anthropomorphic ideas of God as what one may lose and yet keep one's hope, courage, and joy, as what are not really matters of life and death in the keeping or losing of them, this is desirable and necessary, if one holds, as I do, that the common anthropomorphic idea of God and the reliance on miracles must and will inevitably pass away." That is an accurate summary of Mr. Arnold's position, which was further developed in God and the Bible (1875). This work, reprinted from the Contemporary Review, is a sequel to Literature and Dogma, and a reply to its critics. There is no levity in God and the Bible, nor is it entirely destructive. For while the first part aims at separating Christianity from the God of Miracles and the God of Metaphysics, the second part is directed against those German Rationalists who regard the Fourth Gospel as an elaborate fiction in the style of Plato. "Religion," says Lord Salisbury in his incisive

way, can no more be separated from dogma than light from the sun." And on this point Mr. Gladstone would have completely agreed with him. But even the rare concurrence of two political opposites cannot alter the fact that in all ages of the world's history dogma has been a matter of indifference, or even of active dislike, to profoundly religious minds. To them Mr. Arnold appealed without the fervent piety of Archbishop Leighton, but at the same time with an earnest, almost passionate, desire to save spirituality from the onward rush of materialism. Of the Euhemeristic method, which makes merely quantitative concession, he speaks with scorn. "It is as if we were startled by the extravagance of supposing Cinderella's fairy godmother to have actually changed the pumpkin into a coach and six, but should suggest that she really did change it into a one-horse cab." But in his metaphysical chapter he involves himself in speculations almost as fanciful. He advises his disciples, the readers who ran Literature and Dogma through so many editions in so short a time, not to use the word "being," or any of its tenses, when they speak about God. For the Greek verb eiμì, it seems, is derived from a Sanskrit root which signifies the act of breathing, and is purely phænomenal in the proper sense of that much abused term. But this is like the discovery, true or fancied, that the word God means "shining." Qui hæret in litera hæret in cortice. Etymology only proves itself. Mr. Arnold makes great play with the criticism that Literature and Dogma was wanting in "vigour and rigour." But he certainly disposes of Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum in a rigorous and vigorous fashion enough. Self-consciousness is more than