T° CHAPTER VI THE CRITIC OF DOGMA Matthew Arnold's theological writings I come, candidly, with but a mitigated sympathy, believing them to be on the whole the least necessary and the least serviceable part of his literary work, though, like the rest, they are stamped throughout by the mind and character of the man. And yet, while these writings failed entirely to achieve the purposes for which they were immediately undertaken, and while the purposes themselves seem to have acquired in Arnold's mind an importance and an urgency which it is nowadays difficult to appreciate, the reservation is due that much of his religious speculation possesses considerable incidental value, especially for an age characterised by increasing discrimination in matters of dogmatic authority and belief. This fact alone would justify a careful examination both of his positive and negative views. At first sight it might seem incongruous that a man of his fine intellectual temper should have left the pathway of pure letters in order to range, as a protagonist of rationalist criticism, a field of thought which of all others incites to the keenest disputation and yields the most inconclusive results. His letters even more than the sequence of his books prove that he entered literary life with no prepossession in favour of theological controversy. Nor was there anything in the circumstances of his upbringing to prejudice him against the acceptance of the current order of religious beliefs. With all his broad-mindedness, Arnold of Rugby, his father, lived and died an orthodox believer, if one dare without indignity apply to a man of his brilliant parts and of his lofty spirit a term so often abused in the service of uninspiring nescience and insipid spiritual content. Not only so, but his orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of a generous mind which recognised the subjectivity of its own formulæ and never sought to test the faith of others by their doubts, was by none respected more genuinely than by his unorthodox son. And if, as has been suggested, there was a lack of intellectual sympathy between the two, it is not likely that the reason lay in the projected shadow of a religious estrangement. Dr. Arnold died in 1842, when Matthew was but twenty years old, and one may doubt whether the later critic of prevalent dogmas then saw quite clearly the distance which independent thought would take him from the parental moorings. For the rest, every one of Arnold's references to his father indicates that between them a relationship of exceptional cordiality and tenderness subsisted. The beautiful poem, Rugby Chapel, November, 1857, was a spontaneous tribute of filial love as well as of filial piety and admiration. O strong soul, by what shore In the sounding labour-house vast Through thee I believe In the noble and great who are gone; By former ages, who else— Is the race of men whom I see- Helpers and friends of mankind. One dare even venture the supposition that if Arnold, in spite of his departure from orthodox belief, kept under control every tendency to extravagance, and rendered to the last a firm, unswerving, and absolutely genuine attachment to the Church of England, sincerely convinced that her credentials were as right as her dogmas were wrong, it was not more due to culture, moderating though its influence always is, than |