SPIRITUAL INSIGHT OF MATTHEW AENOLD 213 



The great army of literary men and poets are worldly- 

 minded ; whatever else they satisfy, they do not sat- 

 isfy our religious yearnings. Who would say that 

 Chaucer or Spenser or Byron or Burns or Pope had 

 any religious value ? All Arnold's more notable 

 poems sound the spirit's depths. His mind glows 

 in presence of the great facts of life, death, and 

 eternity. Its yearning, spiritual aspiration, and pene- 

 trating insight are remarkable. It is the soul that 

 feels and responds to them, and not merely the 

 aesthetic and literary faculty. All deep spiritual- 

 minded men feel 



..." the heavy and the weary weight 

 Of all this unintelligible world." 



This burdened Matthew Arnold's soul, but it never 

 obscured the clearness of its vision. Does our re- 

 ligious editor deny him spiritual insight because he 

 refused to accept the miracles, or because he did not 

 penetrate the mystery of the Trinity, the Atonement, 

 original sin, and other enigmas with which the reli- 

 gious world has burdened itself ? Who has pene- 

 trated these mysteries ? Millions of pious souls 

 accept them, and call their acceptance an under- 

 standing of them, but they confuse words. These 

 are transcendent mysteries that baffle all reason. 



It is true that in his prose writings Arnold appears 

 solely as the critic, the divider of one thing from 

 another, the classifier. He is cool, clear, disinter- 

 ested. He does not so much address the religious, 

 emotional nature as the intelligence, and aims to 

 satisfy that craving in us for those things that are 



