273 
and that end the identification of our wills with His Will,* 
Who to Mr. Aimold’s eyes is the “ not ourselves who makes 
for righteousness/'’ but Who, in the eyes of men who I 
venture to think were yet more enlightened than he, is not 
only the Great Personal First Cause, the Creator and Pre- 
server of all things, the Father of our spirits, the Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, but One the conception of Whose 
Being rises above and includes all these in the idea of Uni- 
versal Love. Yet I may remark in passing, that Mr. 
Arnold does not seem to be altogether consistent with him- 
self. “ The religion of the true Israel,” which he reminds us 
was “ the good news to the poor” (p. 236), can only, he 
declares, be properly understood by means of “ culture ” 
(Preface, p. xiii.); that is, the knowing “the best that has 
been thought and said in the world.” This was not the view 
of the first propagators of Christianity, for St. Paul tells us 
that not many wise men according to the flesh, not many 
mighty, not many noble, were called. And surely, if “ con- 
duct ” be the end of religion, it is as much within the reach 
of the poor man as the rich, or it is difficult to understand 
how the Christian religion can have been “ good news to the 
poor” at all. 
6. But to return. It must also be admitted that in Mr. 
Arnold’s reply to objectors, which, originally published in the 
Contemporary Review, he has given to the world in a book 
entitled God and the Bible, his tone is far more moderate than 
in the book in which he first assailed the Christianity of the 
day. It would seem as though, occupying as he does an 
intermediate position between Christians in general and the 
Extreme Left of their sceptical antagonists, and having had 
personal experience of the methods of the latter, he had 
become more sensible of the grave faults of logic and 
temper which those antagonists continually display. He 
consequently turns upon them, and with that vigour which, so 
conspicuous in his other works, is conspicuous by its absence 
in Literature and Dogma, he lays bare all the short- 
comings of their school, their extraordinary assumptions, 
their wonderful arguments, their habit of ignoring all that is 
likely to tell against the conclusions which they confidently 
present to the world as unassailable.! But inasmuch as 
* Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction, “ Our wills are ours, to make 
them Thine.” 
f The book called Supernatural Religion, and M. Renan’s late paper in 
the Contemporary Revieiv on St. John’s Gospel, are remarkable instances 
of this off-hand dogmatism on critical and historical points. 
