296 
nized one of the most touching* examples of what is beautiful 
and true in the spectacle of a child at its mother’s knee, 
learning to lisp the words, “ Our Father which art in 
heaven.” But what the Gospel of modern culture, as repre- 
sented by Mr. Matthew Arnold, would substitute for it is, 
“ O not ourselves which makes for righteousness, be thou to 
me the stream of tendency whereby I may fulfil the law of 
my being.”* Which will be the most potent method of 
training up a child in the way of righteousness, I leave to 
others to decide ; but if they decide for the former — and I 
do not see how they can hesitate for a moment — I would 
remark that it would be strange indeed if the young were 
most successfully led into the way of truth by a way that is 
not true. 
31. But I will not sum up my observations on this head 
in my own words. I will quote from that eloquent volume 
to whiqh I have already referred, and to which I wish 
Mr. Arnold had devoted more study before he treated with 
such contempt the idea of a Personal God. “ Personality,” 
says Dean Mansel, “ with all its limitations, though far from 
exhibiting the absolute nature of God as He is, is yet truer, 
grander, and more elevating, more religious, than those 
barren, vague, meaningless abstractions in which men babble 
about nothing under the name of the Infinite. Personal, 
conscious existence, limited though it be, is yet the noblest 
of all existences of which man can dream; for it is that by 
which all existence is revealed to him.”f He shows how a 
morbid horror of what is called Anthropomorphism poisons 
the springs of much of our modern philosophy, and then 
proceeds in words which I cannot deny myself the pleasure of 
quoting];: — “Fools! to dream that man can escape from 
himself — that human reason can draw aught but a human 
portrait of God. . . . Sympathy, and love, and fatherly kind- 
ness have evaporated in the crucible of their philosophy, and 
* Mr. Arnold uses a similar argument himself in the Preface to God and 
the Bible, p. xiv., against calling God the unknowable. The whole passage 
is singularly inconsistent with the tone of his former work. “ God,” lie 
says, “ the name which has so engaged men’s feelings, is, at the same time, 
by its very derivation, a positive name, expressing that which is the most 
blessed of all boons to man, Light ; whereas, Unknowable is a name 
merely negative.” Compare Literature and Dogma, p. 58. “ Concerning 
that which we will not call by the negative name of the unknown and un- 
knowable, but rather by the [equally negative] name of the unexplored and 
inexpressible.” 
•| Limits of Religious Thought, Lcct. III. 
,t Ibid. Lect. I. 
