For the beginnings of religious history, he goes to the House of Israel.
The Israelites, as he was always insisting, had a strong sense for Righteousness, or Conduct; and they found happiness in pursuing it. The idea of Righteousness was their G.o.d, and the enjoyment of Righteousness their religion. This simple conception held its own for generations; but, by the time of the Maccabees, the Israelites had become familiar with the idea of a resurrection from the dead and a final judgment. "The phantasmagories of more prodigal and wild imaginations have mingled with the product of Israel"s austere spirit."
"Israel, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at His coming, and to share in the triumph of the Saints of the Most High."
This, says Arnold, was _Extra-belief_, "Aberglaube," belief beyond what is certain and veritable. "_Extra-belief_ is the poetry of life." The Messianic ideas were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came. When He came, Israel was looking for a Messiah; and, when He began to preach, the better conscience of Judaism recognized in His teaching a new aspect of religion which it had desired. National Righteousness had been the idea of the older Judaism. Personal righteousness was the idea of the New Teaching. "Jesus took the individual Israelite by himself apart, made him listen for the voice of his conscience, and said to him in effect: "If every _one_ would mend _one_, we should have a new world."" A Teacher so winning, so acceptable, so in unison with Israel"s higher aspirations must surely be the Messiah whom earlier generations had expected; and so, in virtue of the purity and n.o.bility of His teaching, Jesus Christ attained His unique position. He became, in popular acceptance, the Great, the Unique Man, in some sense the Son of G.o.d, Prophet and Teacher of the new and n.o.bler morality. So there grew up "a personal devotion to Jesus Christ, who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a pa.s.sage for it into their hearts." And almost immediately after "Aberglaube" regathered; and devotion to Jesus took the form of an _Extra-belief_ of some future advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the triumphs of His followers. And this process of development, begun while Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death.
"As time went on, and Christianity spread wider and wider among the mult.i.tude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of G.o.d meant to believe other points of the legend--His preternatural conception and birth, His miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His future triumphant return to judgment. And these and like matters are what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as the essentials of belief."
From this account, strangely inadequate indeed, but not positively offensive, of the origin and development of Christianity, he pa.s.ses on to the attempts made by current theology to prove the truth of Christianity from Prophecy and Miracle. With regard to prophecy, he has little difficulty in showing that predictions have often miscarried, and that pa.s.sages in the Old Testament have been interpreted as relating to Christ, which probably had no such reference. Thus the first disciples clearly expected the Second Advent to occur in their own life-time; and it has not occurred yet. "The Lord said unto my Lord" is better rendered "The Eternal said unto my lord the King"; and is "a simple promise of victory to a royal leader." So, in something less than four pages, he dismisses the proof from Prophecy, and goes on to the proof from Miracles. "Whether we attack them or whether we defend them, does not much matter. The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away from them. And for this reason: _it sees, as its experience widens, how they arise_." Our duty, then, if we love Jesus Christ and value the New Testament, is to make men see that the claim of Christianity to our allegiance is not based upon Miracles, but rests on quite other grounds, substantial and indestructible. The good faith of the writers of the New Testament--the "reporters of Jesus," as Arnold oddly calls them--is admitted; but, if we are to read their narratives to any profit, we must convince ourselves of their "liability to mistake." Excited, impa.s.sioned, wonder-loving disciples surrounded the simplest acts and words of Christ with a thaumaturgical atmosphere, and, when He merely exercised His power of moral help and healing, the "reporters" declared that He cured the sick and drove out evil spirits. In brief, when the "reporters" narrated miracles wrought by Christ, they were deceived; but, in spite of that, they were excellent men, and our obligations to them are great. "Reverence for all who, in those first dubious days of Christianity, chose the better part, and resolutely cast in their lot with "the despised and rejected of men"! Grat.i.tude to all who, while the tradition was yet fresh, helped by their writings to preserve and set clear the precious record of the words and life of Jesus!"
And yet that record, as they wrote it, is, according to Arnold, brimful of errors, both in fact and in interpretation; and the Church, which has preserved their written tradition, and kept it concurrently with her own oral tradition, has fallen into enormous and fundamental delusion about those "words" and that "life." "Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth, inexhaustible value, a boundless future. But our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracles--and _miracles do not happen_."
The fact that, in the preface to the popular edition of _Literature and Dogma_, he italicized those last words would appear to show that he attached some special, almost "thaumaturgical," value to them. _Miracles do not happen._ It has been justly observed that any man, woman, or child that ever lived might have said this, and have caused no startling sensation. But when Arnold uttered these words, emphasized them, and seemed to base his case against the Catholic creed upon them, it behoved his disciples to ponder them, and to enquire if, and how far, they were true.
As far as we know, there never was but one human being to whom they proved overwhelming, and he is a character in a popular work of fiction.
"Miracles do not happen" broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere"s faith. That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and "boyish innocence of mood," and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the a.s.saults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany. "A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an articulate word to say in its defence.... What weapons the Rector wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded."[50]
A happily-conceived picture--was it in _Punch_?--represented the Rector on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, "Pray, pray, don"t mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to resign my living." However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere apparently read _Literature and Dogma_, and, when he came to "Miracles do not happen" he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold would have called "a hole-and-corner" religion of his own.
Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fict.i.tious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out.
This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author"s observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold"s dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of a different type--a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived--might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the a.s.sumption of human nature by Eternal G.o.d seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order--in common parlance, miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses--some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific--appeared in great numbers. "Grave objections are alleged against the book.... Its conclusions about the meaning of the term _G.o.d_, and about man"s knowledge of G.o.d, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-doc.u.ments in general, to our account of the Canon of the Gospels, to our estimate of the Fourth Gospel." To these criticisms Arnold might have added one yet more cogent. It was felt by many of his readers, and even by some of his most attached disciples, that the "sinuous, easy, unpolemical method" which he vaunted, and which he applied so happily to criticism of books and life, was not grave enough, or cogent enough, when applied to the criticism of Religion. From first to last his method was arbitrary.
[Greek: Hantos hepha]--the Master said it. This was excellent when he criticised literature. To say that a verse of Macaulay"s was painful, or a line of Francis Newman"s hideous, was well within his province. To say that one author wrote in the Grand Style and that another showed the Note of Provinciality--that also was his right. To p.r.o.nounce that a pa.s.sage from Sophocles was religious poetry of the highest and most edifying type,[51] whereas the Eternal Power was displeased by "such doggerel hymns as
_Sing Glory, Glory, Glory, to the Great G.o.d Triune,_"
this again was all very well; for matters of this kind do not admit of argument and proof. But, when it comes to handling Religion, this arbitrary method--this innate and unquestioning claim to settle what is good or bad, true or false--provokes rebellion. No one was more severe than Arnold on the folly of Puritanism in founding its doctrine of Justification on isolated texts borrowed from St. Paul; yet no one was more confident than he that man"s whole conception of G.o.d could be safely based on the fact that at a certain period of their history the Jews took to expressing G.o.d by a word which signifies "Eternal."
"Rejoice and give thanks," "Rejoice evermore," are certainly texts of Holy Writ; but he seems to think that, by merely quoting them, he has abrogated all the sterner side of the Bible"s teaching about human life and destiny. An even more curious instance of literary self-confidence may be cited from his treatment of the Lord"s commission to the Apostles. "It is extremely improbable that Jesus should ever have charged his Apostles to "baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."" But "He may perfectly well have said: "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained."" The one formula seems to Arnold anachronistic and unlikely, the other perfectly natural. This is all very interesting and may be very true; but it is too dogmatic to be convincing. In such a case one may respectfully cry out that Letters are overstepping their province; and that one man"s sense of fitness, style, and literary likelihood is not sufficient warrant for discrediting a well-tested and established doc.u.ment.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Matthew Arnold, 1884
_Photo Elliott & Fry_]
Yet, after all, doc.u.ments, however well-tested and established, are not the backbone of the Christian religion. It may well be that to minds inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in "the Bible and the Bible only" as the ground of their religion; Arnold"s solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and revolutionary. But they fell harmless on the minds which had long schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the Canon were resolved into mere literature.
Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal to History. He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed. It was easy enough to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who write to the _Guardian_. But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone, with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority; and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy fashion, that "it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these matters satisfactorily."
But, though clergymen are thus put quietly out of court, a layman may still be heard; and one could almost wish that he had lived to handle, in some fresh preface to _Literature and Dogma_, such a confession of faith as that which Lord Salisbury gave in 1894--
"To me, the central point is the Resurrection of Christ, which I believe. Firstly, because it is testified by men who had every opportunity of seeing and knowing, and whose veracity was tested by the most tremendous trials, both of energy and endurance, during long lives.
Secondly, because of the marvellous effect it had upon the world. As a moral phenomenon, the spread and mastery of Christianity is without a parallel. I can no more believe that colossal moral effects can be without a cause, than I can believe that the various motions of the magnet are without a cause, though I cannot wholly explain them. To any one who believes the Resurrection of Christ, the rest presents little difficulty. No one who has that belief will doubt that those who were commissioned by Him to speak--Paul, Peter, Mark, John--carried a Divine message. St. Matthew falls into the same category. St. Luke has the warrant of the generation of Christians who saw and heard the others."
So far the testimony of a layman. Arnold, as we know, loved and elegized one Dean of Westminster. Would he have tolerated the testimony of another?
"The Church believes to-day in the Resurrection of Christ, because she has always believed in it. If all the doc.u.ments which tell the story of the first Easter Day should disappear, the Church would still shout her Easter praises, and offer her Easter sacrifice of thanksgiving; for she is older than the oldest of her doc.u.ments, and from father to son all through the centuries she has pa.s.sed on the message of the first Easter morning--"The Lord is risen indeed." The Church believes in the Resurrection because she is the product of the Resurrection."[52]
But, in spite of varied criticism, _Literature and Dogma_ was well received. Three editions were published in 1873; a fourth in 1874; a fifth in 1876, and the "popular edition" in 1883. As usual, he was serenely pleased with his handiwork. In 1874 he wrote to his sister: "It will more and more become evident how entirely religious is the work which I have done in _Literature and Dogma_. The enemies of religion see this well enough already." Ten years later, he wrote from Cincinnati: "What strikes me in America is the number of friends _Literature and Dogma_ has made me, amongst ministers of religion especially--and how the effect of the book here is conservative."
To the various criticisms of the book he began replying in the _Contemporary Review_ for October, 1874. In November of that year he wrote to Lady de Rothschild: "You must read my metaphysics in this last _Contemporary_. My first and last appearance in the field of metaphysics, where you, I know, are no stranger." The completed reply was published as _G.o.d and the Bible_ in 1875. This reply, which contained, as he thought, "the best prose he had ever succeeded in writing," was a rea.s.sertion and development of the previous work, and was written, as the preface said, "for a reader who is more or less conversant with the Bible, who can feel the attraction of the Christian religion, but who has acquired habits of intellectual seriousness, has been revolted by having things presented solemnly to him for his use which will not hold water, and who will start with none of such things even to reach what he values. Come what may, he will deal with this great matter of religion fairly. It is the aim of the present volume, as it was the aim of _Literature and Dogma_, to show to such a man that his honesty will be rewarded.... I write to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything."
It was, we must suppose, with the same benign intention that in 1877 he addressed himself to the task of persuading the Edinburgh Philosophical Inst.i.tution that Bishop Butler was an untrustworthy guide in that mysterious region which lies between Philosophy and Religion. For this task, as Mr. Gladstone justly observed: he "was placed, by his own peculiar opinions, in a position far from auspicious with respect to this particular undertaking. He combined a fervent zeal for the Christian religion with a not less boldly avowed determination to transform it beyond the possibility of recognition by friend or foe. He was thus placed under a sort of necessity to condemn the handiwork of Bishop Butler, who in a certain sense gives it a new charter." Over Butler"s grave stands a magnificent inscription, from the pen of Southey, which well ill.u.s.trates the estimation in which for upwards of a century he was held by the serious mind of England--
Others had established the Historical and Prophetical grounds of the Christian Religion, and that sure testimony of its truth which is found in its perfect adaptation to the heart of man.
It was reserved for him to develop its a.n.a.logy to the Const.i.tution and Course of Nature; and, laying his strong foundations in the depth of that great argument, there to construct another and irrefragable proof: thus rendering Philosophy subservient to Faith, and finding in outward and visible things the type and evidence of those within the veil.
In his lectures on Butler, Arnold set out to prove that the Philosophy was as unsound as the Faith to which it was subservient; and that it could not hold its own against Atheism or Agnosticism, but only against a system which conceded a Personal Governor of the Universe. This is the argument against the Deists which he puts into Butler"s mouth: "You all concede a Supreme Personal First Cause, the almighty and intelligent Governor of the Universe; this, you and I both agree, is the system and order of nature. But you are offended at certain things in revelation.... Well, I will show you that in your and my admitted system of nature there are just as many difficulties as in the system of revelation." And on this, says Arnold, he does show it, "and by adversaries such as his, who grant what the Deist or Socinian grants, he never has been answered, he never will be answered. The spear of Butler"s reasoning will even follow and transfix the Duke of Somerset,[53] who finds so much to condemn in the Bible, but "retires into one una.s.sailable fortress--faith in G.o.d.""[54] Butler"s method, then, is allowed to be potent enough to crush all such half-believers as still clung to the idea of a Personal G.o.d and Intelligent Ruler; but it had no force or cogency against such as, following Arnold, attenuated the idea of G.o.d into a Stream of Tendency. This theme he elaborated with great ingenuity and characteristic dogmatism in his _Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist_; and, inasmuch as no task can be more distasteful than to attack the teaching of a man whose genius and character one recognizes among the formative influences of one"s life, I will leave the upshot of this ill-starred endeavour to be summarized by Butler"s great champion, Mr. Gladstone--
"Various objections have been taken from various quarters to this point and that in the argument of Butler; but Mr. Arnold"s criticisms, as a whole, remain wholly isolated and unsupported. It is impossible to acquit him of the charge of a carelessness implying levity, and of an ungovernable bias towards finding fault.... Mr. Arnold himself will probably suffer more from his own censures than the great Christian philosopher who is the object of them. And it is well for him that all they can do is to effect some deduction from the fame which has been earned by him in other fields, as a true man, a searching and sagacious literary critic, and a poet of genuine creative genius."[55]
It is now time to enquire what practical effect he produced by all this writing (and a good deal which followed it in the same sense) on the religious thought of his time. This is a question which, in the absence of any clear or general testimony, one can only answer by the light of one"s own experience. The present writer can aver that, so far as his own personal knowledge goes, the strange case of Robert Elsmere was a unique instance. He has, of course, known plenty of people to whom, alas! revealed Religion--the accepted Faith of the Church and the Gospel--was a tale of no meaning, which they regarded either with blank indifference or with bitter and furious hostility. But, in all these cases, dissent from the Christian creed depended upon negations far deeper than "Miracles do not happen." It depended on a stark incapacity to conceive the ideas of G.o.d, of permitted evil, of sin, its consequences and its remedy, and of life after death. Where there was the capacity to conceive these mysteries, men were not troubled by the minor questions of miracle, prophecy, and textual research. To use an ill.u.s.tration which the present writer has used elsewhere, they were not shaken by _Robert Elsmere_, not confirmed by _Lux Mundi_. Still less were they agitated by the literary dogmaticism of Matthew Arnold. Many people disliked his style, his methods, his ill.u.s.trations; and, not knowing the man, disliked him also. But, as he justly observed, if he had written as these objectors wished him to write, no one would have read him; so he went on in his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" way; and the people who disliked him closed their ears, and "flocked all the more eagerly to Messrs. Moody and Sankey."
Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1895--"It is very difficult to keep one"s temper in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches on religious matters. His patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive and trying than rank unbelief."
But then again there were those--and we should hope the great majority--who, whether they knew the man or not, loved his temper, admired his methods, and found no more difficulty in detaching what was good from what was bad in his teaching, than he himself found in the case of his master, Wordsworth. A Catholic priest, ministering formerly in the Roman and now in the English Church, thus describes the help which he gained from Arnold at a time of distress and transition. "That I held to any sort of Christianity, and continued to use and enjoy the Bible, I owe entirely to Matthew Arnold. I began to read him in 1882; first his prose, and then his verse. For several years I read him over, and over, and over again with growing delight and profit; until, so far as I was able, I understood something of his mind and methods. He taught me how to think, and how to write. He undoubtedly saved me from leaving the Papal Church a dulled and blank materialist, thoroughly and violently anti-Christian; and his gentle influence tended me through the next few years, until I was mellowed for the process of reconstruction."[56]
This is a fine tribute to all that was best and most characteristic in his teaching. Beyond doubt, by his insistence on the relation of Letters to Religion, he helped many young men to read their Bibles with better understanding and keener appreciation; and enabled them that are without to enter for the first time into the spirit and attractiveness of the Christian ideal. Not only so, but men established in age, position, and orthodoxy, felt and acknowledged his helpfulness. When he delivered an address on "The Church of England" to a gathering of clergy at Sion College, he tells us that "Clergyman on clergyman turned on the Chairman" (who had scented heresy), "and said they agreed with me far more than with him." A divine so profoundly Evangelical as Bishop Thorold larded his sermons and charges with extracts from Arnold"s prose and verse. In 1893 Arnold dined with Archbishop Benson, and "thought it a gratifying marvel, considering what things I have published"; but the marvel was of such frequent occurrence that it had almost ceased to be marvellous. That this was so was due, no doubt, in great measure to the charm of his character and conversation. It was not easy for any one who knew him to take serious offence at what he wrote. Just as Coleridge"s metaphysics were said by a friend to be "only his fun," so Arnold"s theology was regarded by his admirers as part of his playfulness. It was difficult to disentangle what he really wished to teach from his jokes about the hangings of the Celestial Council-Chamber; "Willesden beyond Trent"; "Change Alley and Alley Change"; Professor Birks, "his brows crowned with myrtle," going in procession to the Temple of Aphrodite; the Duke of Somerset "running into the strong tower" of Deism, and thinking himself "safe" there from further questionings. This method of ill.u.s.tration threw an air of comedy over the theme which it ill.u.s.trated; and, if the criticism failed to disturb faith in Biblical theology, the critic had only himself to thank.
Another element in the satisfaction with which dignitaries and clergymen came to regard him was the fact that he was so definitely a supporter of the Church of England. To the principle of Established Churches, as part of the wider principle of extending everywhere the scope of the State, he was always friendly; but he felt the difficulty of maintaining them where, as in Scotland, they had nothing to show except "a religious service which is perhaps the most dismal performance ever invented by man," and a theology shared by all the non-established bodies round about. No such difficulty appeared in the case of the Church of England, with its historic claim, its seemly worship, its distinctive doctrine; so of that Church as by law established he was the consistent defender.
Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent. Margate was, in his eyes, a "brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness--let me add, all its salubrity." When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the National Church-yards, he likened the dissenting Service to a reading from Eliza Cook, and the Church"s Service to a reading from Milton, and protested against the Liberal attempt to "import Eliza Cook into a public rite." He even was bold enough to cite his friend Mr. John Morley as secretly sharing this repugnance to Eliza Cook in a public rite. "_Scio, rex Agrippa, quia credis._ He is keeping company with his Festus Chamberlain and his Drusilla Collings, and cannot openly avow the truth; but in his heart he consents to it."
For the beauty, the poetry, the winningness of Catholic worship and Catholic life Arnold had the keenest admiration. "The need for beauty is a real and ever rapidly growing need in man; Puritanism cannot satisfy it, Catholicism and the Church of England can." He dwelt with delighted interest on Eugenie de Guerin"s devotional practices, her happy Christmas in the soft air of Languedoc, her midnight Ma.s.s, her beloved Confession. On the Ma.s.s itself no one has written more sympathetically, although he disavowed the fundamental doctrine on which the Ma.s.s is founded. "Once admit the miracle of the "atoning sacrifice," once move in this order of ideas, and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him?"
In truth he had a strong sense, uncommon in Protestants, of Worship as distinct from Prayer--of Worship as the special object of a religious a.s.sembly. When he gave a Prayer-book to a child, he wrote on the flyleaf: "We have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him." "In religion," he said, "there are two parts: the part of thought and speculation, and the part of worship and devotion.... It does not help me to think a thing more clearly, that thousands of other people are thinking the same; but it does help me to worship with more devotion, that thousands of other people are worshipping with me. The connexion of common consent, antiquity, public establishment, long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious worship." He quotes with admiration his favourite Joubert: "Just what makes worship impressive is its publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its observance, universally and visibly holding its sway through all the details both of our outward and of our inward life."
"Worship," he says, "should have in it as little as possible of what divides us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act."
Again he quotes Joubert: "The best prayers are those which have nothing distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple adoration."
"Catholic worship," he said, "is likely, however modified, to survive as the general worship of Christians, because it is the worship which, in a sphere where poetry is permissible and natural, unites most of the elements of poetry." And again, "Unity and continuity in public religious worship are a need of human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christendom. A Catholic Church transformed is, I believe, the Church of the future."
His speculations on that future are interesting and, naturally, not always consistent. In 1879 he writes to Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff: "Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return-current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic." In 1880 he sees a great future for Catholicism, which, by virtue of its superior charm and poetry, will "endure while all the Protestant sects (amongst which I do not include the Church of England) dissolve and perish." In 1881 he seemed to apprehend the return to Westminster Abbey, after "Wisdom"s too short reign," of--
Folly revived, re-furbish"d sophistries, And pullulating rites externe and vain.
In the last autumn of his life he wrote to M. Fontanes--a friend whose acquaintance he first made over _St. Paul and Protestantism_--
"Your letter has reached me here (Ottery St. Mary), where I am staying with Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, who is a grand-nephew of the poet. He loves literature, and, being a great deal richer than his grand-uncle, or than poets in general, has built a library from which I now write, and on which I wish that you could feast your eyes with me.... The Church Congress has just been held, and shows as usual that the clergy have no idea of the real situation; but indeed the conservatism and routine in religion are such in England that the line taken by the clergy cannot be wondered at. Nor are the conservatism and routine a bad thing, perhaps, in such a matter; but the awakening will one day come, and there will be much confusion. Have you looked at Tolstoi"s books on religion: in French they have the t.i.tles _Ma Religion, Ma Confession, Que Faire?_ The first of these has been well translated, and has excited much attention over here; perhaps it is from this side, the socialist side that the change is likely to come: the Bible will be retained, but it will be said, as Tolstoi says, that its true, socialistic teaching has been overlooked, and attention has been fixed on metaphysical dogmas deduced from it, which are at any rate, says Tolstoi, secondary. He does not provoke discussion by denying or combating them; he merely relegates them to a secondary position.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Grave in Laleham Churchyard
Where Matthew Arnold, his wife, and three sons are buried
_Photo Ralph Lane_]
And now that we have enquired into Arnold"s influence on theology, it is, perhaps, proper to ask what he himself believed. His faith seems to have been, by a curious paradox, far stronger on the Christian than on the Theistic side. "A Stream of Tendency" can never satisfy the idea of G.o.d, as ordinary humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth"s ode beginning "Spade."[57]
But he had, as we have already seen, an unending admiration--a homage which did not stop far short of worship--for the character and teaching of Jesus Christ; and he placed salvation in conformity to that teaching, as it is explained by St. Paul. And this meant death to sin; the abrogation and annulment of bad habits and tendencies; resurrection with Christ to the higher life which He taught us to pursue. _The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ._ He would have allowed no ant.i.thesis between the two halves of the text, but would have taught that the eternal welfare of man consisted in obeying the Law, receiving the Grace, and pursuing the Truth.
Nothing more dogmatic than this could safely be put forward as representing his theology; but, though not dogmatic, his mind was intensely ecclesiastical. His contempt for individual whims and fancies, his love of corporate action and collective control, operated as powerfully in the religious as in the social sphere. He admired and clave to the Church of England because it was not, like Miss Cobbe"s new religion and the British College of Health, the product of an individual fancy, setting out to make all things new on a plan of its own. The Church of England, whether it could theologically be called "Catholic"
or not, was certainly "the continuous and historical Church of this country." In 1869 he praised his friend Temple, afterwards Archbishop, for "showing his strong Church feeling, and sense of the value and greatness of the historic development of Christianity, of which the Church is the expression." It was the National organ for promoting Righteousness and Perfection by means of Culture and for diffusing Sweetness and Light. In the last year of his life he wrote to Mr. Lionel Tollemache: "I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a Liberal Anglican; and I think the times are in favour of our being allowed so to call ourselves."