What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself?  Without doubt the twenty years by which Arnold was Newman’s junior at Oxford made a great difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the English world of letters, at the time when Arnold’s mind was maturing.  He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman.  His mind was hardly one to appreciate the whole force of that spell.  He was at Oxford too early for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the scientific conception of the world can be said to be true.  Arnold often boasted that he was no metaphysician.  He really need never have mentioned the fact.  The assumption that whatever is true can be verified in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies is a very serious mistake.  Yet his whole intellectual strength was devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion, but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation of duty and the joy of righteousness.  With all the scorn that Arnold pours upon the trust which we place in God’s love, he yet holds to the conviction that ’the power without ourselves which makes for righteousness’ is one upon which we may in rapture rely.

Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and miraculous events, is no longer tenable.  We must confine ourselves to such ethical truths as can be verified by experience.  We must reject everything which goes beyond these.  Religion has no more to do with supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy.  It has nothing to do with either.  It has to do with conduct.  It is folly to make religion depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral governor of the universe, as the theologians have done.  For the object of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase:  ’The Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.’  So soon as we go beyond this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief, aberglaube, which always revenges itself.  These are the main contentions of his book, Literature and Dogma, 1875.

One feels the value of Arnold’s recall to the sense of the literary character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his book, Saint Paul and Protestantism, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which the imagination of mankind has had upon religion.  One feels the truth of his assertion of our ignorance.  One feels Arnold’s own deep earnestness.  It was his concern that reason and the will of God should prevail.  Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in religion.  One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious.