293 
we therefore know nothing’ of the sun ? Is it altogether 
impossible to form a definite conception of him? Are our 
ideas of him, as the great vivifying power of animal and 
vegetable life, whose threefold beams diffuse light, heat, and 
chemical influences throughout the earth, merely inexact 
ideas “ thrown out,” at something which we have no power 
to grasp, or are they not perfectly exact and true in themselves, 
though they by no means exhaust the properties of that to 
which they belong ? 
28. The late Dean Mansel, whose powerful treatise Mr. 
Arnold, as is usual with the assailants of present day Chris- 
tianity, ignores,* points out the intellectual difficulties in the 
way of combining the idea of the Personal with the idea of 
the Eternal, yet he shows that we may be able to form a true 
conception concerning some of the attributes of God which 
the word personality , inadequate though it be, is the only one 
capable of expressing.! And if it be asked, why insist 
upon the use of a term which, if confessedly inadequate to 
express the truth in all its fulness, is sui’e to be also mis- 
leading ? we reply, because, to omit to use it would not 
only be misleading also, but would lead us much farther from 
the truth than the other horn of the dilemma. In the 
former alternative we use language which is insufficient to 
express all the truth, in the latter we use language which is 
actually contrary to truth. And there is no third course open 
to us. We must either affirm of God those attributes, of 
* Mr. Arnold gives a kind of reason why he does not answer the Bampton 
Lectures of Professor Mozley, in God and the Bible, p. 41. It is ingenious, 
but hardly satisfactory. It has since been done, he says, by the author of 
Supernatural Religion. That is to say, that some one else has done what 
Mr. Arnold ought to have done himself. Or, if Mr. Arnold contends that 
it would be “ vain labour,” because “ the human mind is losing its reliance 
upon them— i.e. miracles,” it may at least be asked whether it is not the 
duty of the human mind to give the whole matter its fair and candid con- 
sideration, and whether it can be considered either fair or candid to ignore 
altogether what is said in arrest of judgment upon the most important 
questions in heaven and earth. As far as Mr. Arnold’s treatises are con- 
cerned, a stranger to the whole question might imagine from them that all 
the writers on the Evidences were Butler and Pascal, and those extremely 
ridiculous and contemptible persons the “ Bishops of Winchester and 
Gloucester.” 
f I am aware that Dean Mansel’s volume led to a lively controversy, 
even among the defenders of Christianity. Whether Dean Mansel were 
right or wrong, it is not my present intention to inquire. I only wish to call 
attention to the fact that his brilliant and masterly treatise is as utterly 
ignored by Mr. Arnold as if it had never been written, a very convincing 
proof that the attitude of modern “ culture ” to Christianity is not that of 
thorough, honest, impartial inquiry. 
