214 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



true and excellent in and of themselves. In his 

 religious writings, in " Literature and Dogma," " God 

 and the Bible," " St. Paul and Protestantism," Ar- 

 nold is still the critic, the diagnoser ; he is solely 

 bent on seeing things just as they are ; but it seems 

 to me there is no want of spiritual insight, unless 

 we narrow the term so that it means seeing the 

 truth of some particular creed or dogma. 



When we examine our notions closely, it is very 

 doubtful if what is called spiritual insight differs 

 from any other true insight, — the power to pene- 

 trate into hidden forces and meanings, to get at the 

 true inwardness of things. True, the logical, rea- 

 soning mind differs from the imaginative poetic 

 mind, and from the fervid religious mind ; but is 

 not the faculty with which we determine the truth 

 or falsity of a proposition the same in all cases ? A 

 thing cannot be false to the intellect and true to 

 what we call the soul or the heart, nor vice versa. 

 The intellect may not see what the heart feels, but 

 the heart is blind, and the mind alone can supply 

 it with eyes. There is no more unsafe guide in our 

 search for the truth than our feelings or our attrac- 

 tions and repulsions. We feel so and so about a 

 matter, but the previous question is, ought we to 

 feel so and so ? By the term " spiritual insight " I 

 suppose we commonly mean the capacity to appre- 

 hend spiritual things, or those things that are related 

 to our religious needs and aspirations, and I find no 

 clearer or fuller recognition of these things than in 

 the pages of Matthew Arnold. The passage in one 



