295 
to hear and answer it. Mr. Arnold has endeavoured to 
represent this as part of Jewish and Christian Aberglaube, 
though to assert this is to rend both Old and New Testa- 
ment asunder, and to present us with a few disjointed 
fragments, as the whole of Jewish or Christian belief. He 
declares* that Israel, whatever our Bibles may say, said 
from the first that God was “ the Eternal not ourselves 
that makes for righteousness ” and nothing more. But why- 
should not the two ideas be united ? Is there anything in- 
compatible in them ? Does not Moses f combine them when, 
after speaking of God as “a God of truth, and without 
iniquity, just and right is He,” goes on to say, “ Do ye thus 
requite the Lord, 0 foolish people and unwise ? is He not 
thy Father that bought thee ? hath He not made thee and 
established thee ? ” And does Mr. Arnold seriously mean to 
maintain his obiter dictum that the “ account of creation ” 
with which the Bible opens, and the truth of which is assumed 
throughout, “ all came to ” the writer “ from the idea of 
righteousness” 
30. The truth is, that if we once surrender the doctrine 
of the personality of God, however inadequate the term 
may be to express our meaning, we have robbed religion, 
even according to Mr. Arnold's definition of it, of its main- 
spring. Mr. Arnold may expurgate the Bible, and enlarge 
on the immense practical advantage those will gain who adopt 
his method ; but what is religion without an All-Father ? 
What is it in the hour of strong temptation, when the 
“stream of tendency” whereby we fulfil the law of righteous- 
ness seems almost to have ceased to flow ? What is it in the 
hour of trial, of sickness, of despondency — what in the agony 
of fruitless remorse ? Men in old time often died by their 
own hand, and that because they believed either in Mr. 
Arnold's God, or else in the irreversible decrees of a Fate by 
which Jupiter himself was bound. What but the belief in a 
Father, merciful and gracious, who loves those whom He 
chastens, can preserve us when pressed down by accumu- 
lated anxieties, from giving way to despair ? And what is 
left, I would further ask, to train up a child in the ways of 
that righteousness which Mr. Arnold has so much at heart ? 
I have elsewhere remarked, § that the poets have ever recog- 
* Literature and Dogma, p. 38. 
t Mr. Arnold does not impugn the Mosaic origin of the book of Deuter- 
onomy. 
X Page 35. § Rector and His Friends, p. 178. 
