MATTHEW AEKOLD'S CRITICISM 105 



that makes them take a deeper hold upon the spirit. 

 Science knows as clearly as religion that "the face 

 of the Lord is against them that do evil," but does 

 it know it in just the intimate and personal way 1 

 It knows it only as it knows the truth of one of 

 Kepler's laws, by a process of cool ratiocination; but 

 religion knows it through an emotional process, into 

 which the personal elements of love and fear enter. 

 I am not discussing the superiority of one mode of 

 belief over the other; I only urge that worship has 

 its rise in the latter and not in the former. Eeason 

 is not the basis of a national religion, and never has 

 been. It is very doubtful if the disclosure of a 

 scientific basis for the truths of religion would not 

 be a positive drawback to the religious efficacy of 

 those truths, because this view of them would come 

 in time to supplant and to kill the personal emo- 

 tional view which worship requires. 



It is therefore considered as religion, as the basis 

 of public worship, that Arnold does injustice to the 

 popular faith. As science, or philosophy, what he 

 has to oifer may be much more acceptable to certain 

 advanced minds, but to the race as a whole a sub- 

 limated extract of Christianity can never take the 

 place of the old palpable concrete forms. In fact, 

 getting at the natural truths of a people's religion is 

 very much like burning their temples and their idols 

 and offering them the ashes. 



Another form which Arnold's Hellenism takes is 

 that it begets in him what we may call the spirit of 



