Matthew Arnold Part 11

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: Chast.i.ty 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 chast.i.ty. 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 Cla.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 sc.r.a.pe, 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 c.o.c.ker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a cla.s.s, 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: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] 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 cla.s.s with which he was by the work of his life brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only cla.s.s where "elegance and refinement, beauty and grace" were found, was inaccessible to Light. In both cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p, [Greek: euschmnonos 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 circ.u.mstances of life exactly the line of conduct which would best consist with Delicacy, and so to make virtue victorious by practising it attractively.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Matthew Arnold, 1880

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

_Photo F. Hollyer_]

[Footnote 33: _The Life of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley_, 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: "Chast.i.ty 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 superst.i.tion claimed the reverence of men and women. It was identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that Infamous, against which the main a.s.sault 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 mult.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 h.e.l.lenizer. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments, "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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sertion 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 G.o.d'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 ill.u.s.trates 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 fas.h.i.+on"; 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 lords.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 G.o.d. But to serve G.o.d, "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 G.o.d? "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 G.o.d.' 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, for reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order and with G.o.d'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 G.o.d; He was dead to sin, He lived to G.o.d; and in this life to G.o.d He persevered even to His cruel bodily death on the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of G.o.d, says Paul, are the sons of G.o.d. If this is so with even us, who live to G.o.d so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience, how much more is He who lives to G.o.d entirely and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only son of G.o.d?" 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 a.s.sertion 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 G.o.d, which, according to Jewish theology, had been with G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 sanct.i.ty 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 subst.i.tution, or a satisfaction, or an appeas.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d, 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 superst.i.tious ages. All, all, will be too little to pay half the debt which the Church of G.o.d owes to this 'least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of G.o.d.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tle, and to this volume Arnold prefixed a preface, enforcing his doctrine with some vigorous. .h.i.ts at a dissenting Member of Parliament called Winterbotham, for glorying in an att.i.tude 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 t.i.tle _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 rea.s.sure 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 a.s.sign to it, a verifiable basis and not an a.s.sumption. 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 "G.o.d" is a literary term to which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied. He p.r.o.nounces, without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in reason for the idea that G.o.d 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 G.o.d? and here he answers with his celebrated definition. G.o.d 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 G.o.d. And as for our relations with G.o.d, called by most people Religion, well--"Religion is morality touched by Emotion." This, and nothing more.