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ilie schools of the Stoics.* * * § And the modern doctrine which 
identifies God with ourselves and ourselves with God, and all 
with the universe, is also to be found in many of the ancient 
systems. Yet, in spite of the inability of our modern philo- 
sophers to present us with anything but theories of the 
Infinite and Absolute which have been found incapable of 
meeting the wants of mankind, the blasts of the trumpets at 
which the walls of our Jericho are to fall flat are blown as 
confidently as ever. The danger is in fact considered so 
imminent, that a mediator between the combatants has 
appeared in the person of the gentleman whose name stands 
at the head of this paper. Christianity, he considers, is lost, 
unless she enter into a parley with her assailants. It is time 
that the conditions of peace should be decided, and he has 
drawn them up. It would be a serious thing for the world if 
Christianity and the Bible were to be entirely abandoned. 
Therefore they are to be suffered to exist, f But modern 
culture has had so indisputably the best of the conflict, that, 
in order to escape total annihilation, by far the greater part of 
Christianity must be sacrificed. The Bible is to be retained, 
but not all, only just so much as Mr. Aimold thinks we are 
entitled to keep. Miracles, prophecy, the authenticity of its 
books, its doctrine of a Personal God, all are to go ; but we 
are to be allowed to retain as a residuum, that, and only that 
which, according to Mr. Arnold, has a “verifiable basis ”% — 
the proclamation of a “ not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
ness.'” Christianity is to exist still, but she must be prepared 
to surrender her belief in the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, in God manifest in the flesh, in a Risen Saviour, in 
God the Holy Ghost. She must abandon her creeds — all of 
them§ — as the product of “popular” or “theological 
* Mr. Arnold imitates the Stoic philosophy in its uncertainty and incon- 
sistency. He does not appear to believe in a law of necessity affecting 
actions (many of the Stoics excepted actions from that law), for he seems 
to conceive the possibility of man’s resisting the “ not ourselves that makes 
for righteousness.” He does not identify man with the principle that 
“makes for righteousness,” for he declares that principle to be “the not 
ourselves.” But when he speaks of immortality, he seems to regard it as a 
kind of “ remerging in the general soul,” as Tennyson calls this idea in his 
In Mcmoriam. For immortality is a “ living in the eternal order, which 
never dies .” — God and the Bible, p. 393. 
t Preface, pp. viii., ix. — “ We regret the rejection [of the Bible] as much 
as the clergy and ministers of religion do.” “Let us admit that the Bible 
cannot possibly die.” 
I Preface, p. x. 
§ Ch. ix. — “ Aberglaube re-invading.” 
