MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CKITIOISM 101 



Balaam's ass spoke, in no respect differs from the 

 mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna, 

 of wood or stone, winked. " 



The most that can be claimed for each sect, each 

 chtirch, each party, is that it is free from some special 

 bondage which still confines the mind of some other 

 sect or party. Those, indeed, are free whom the 

 truth makes free ; but each sect and church has only 

 a fragment of the truth, a little here and a little 

 there. Both Catholic and Protestant have the germ 

 of religion, and both have a false philosophy of the 

 germ. 



"But Catholicism has the germ invested in an 

 immense poetry, the gradual work of time and na- 

 ture, and of the great impersonal artist. Catholic 

 Christendom. " 



The unity or identity of literature and religion, as 

 with the Greeks, — this is the animating idea of " Lit- 

 erature and Dogma." In this work Arnold brings 

 his Hellenism to bear upon the popular religion and 

 the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible, upon which 

 the churches rest; and the result is that we get 

 from him a literary interpretation of the Bible, a 

 free and plastic interpretation, as distinguished from 

 the hard, literal, and historical interpretation. He 

 reads the Bible as literature, and not as history or 

 science. He seeks its verification in an appeal to 

 taste, to the simple reason, to the fitness of things. 

 He finds that the Biblical writers used words in a 

 large and free way, in a fluid and literary way, and 

 not at all with the exactness and stringency of science 



