XV 



SPIRITUAL mSIGHT OF MATTHEW AKNOLD 



"T NOTE that one of our religious journals looks 

 -'- upon Matthew Arnold as he appears in his 

 prose writings as " singularly deficient in spiritual 

 insight." Unless the terms are used in some special 

 and restricted sense, I do not think the charge quite 

 just. If it is meant that he was not eminently a 

 devout nature, a sample of the specialization of the 

 spiritual and religious faculties, like Newman or 

 Maurice or even Sir Thomas Browne, then I quite 

 agree. But if it is meant that he was deficient in 

 the power to apprehend the value and importance 

 of invisible, spiritual things, the value of the reli- 

 gious sentiment in man, that he had not a clear, 

 penetrating vision into the sources of the spirit's 

 wealth and strength, that he was not moved and 

 attracted by the good as well as by the beautiful, 

 by righteousness as well as by lucidity, then I pro- 

 test. I think Arnold must be classed among the men 

 who, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, 

 are essentially religious, men who reach and move 

 the spirit and help forward the higher life ; less 

 than the men named in some respects, but superior 

 in others, — superior to any of them in clearness of 

 vision, in power to see things exactly as they are. 



