NTERPOSING in point of time between the books

Culture and Anarchy and Literature and Dogma, and in some sense epitomising the teaching of both, comes, in the Arnoldian bibliography, a work less celebrated indeed than these, yet marked by solid scholarship and acute reasoning. This is a collection of four essays called, after the first and most important of their number, St. Paul and Protestantism. To the theological expert belong the right and the duty of determining the value of this Pauline study as a piece of exegetics, and it is no mean compliment to Arnold the man of letters that the really serious theological criticism herein contained has earned the expert's cordial praise. Even the expert cannot be expected to accept the heterodoxy of the book,-and there is plenty of it, reverently phrased and winningly commended,—yet a judgment like that of Principal Tulloch upon this "singularly lucid and vivid exposition of Pauline thought," Arnold's "best biblical study," is of greater value than more flattering eulogy from critics without special knowledge:

'Nothing can be better than the manner in which he emphasises the moral and practical side of religion which Puritanism sometimes puts out of sight. Nothing can be truer than parts of his analysis of the order of St. Paul's ideas and their ground in the apostolic experience. There are passages here and there so admirably expressed, and even lines of thought so admirably worked out, that we feel ourselves in face of a genuine religious teacher. Failing to do justice to the Puritan theology, or to feel the glowing heart kindled at the Pauline hearth out of which it once sprang, yet-just because he stands so much out of the range of Puritan ideas-he has been able to show how much broader is St. Paul's range of thought than that of Puritanism, and how frequently the latter has emphasised what St. Paul has minimised, and theorised where St. Paul was merely using rhetoric or giving vent to his emotion." "

But theological criticism was not in reality Arnold's primary purpose in writing this book. Writing to his friend M. Fontanès, a French pastor, on September 20, 1872, he says: "En parlant de St. Paul je n'ai pas parlé en théologien, mais en homme de lettres mécontent de la très mauvaise critique littéraire qu'on appliquait à un grand esprit; si j'avais parlé en théologien on ne m'eût pas ecouté." His main object was, by setting forth St. Paul's doctrine in a true light, as he himself knew the light, to show that Puritanism rested 1 Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion.

upon a misconception, or at any rate upon a disproportionate and ill-balanced estimate, of that doctrine. The effort was, in fact, part of an ambitious scheme for the unification of the Churches. As a mere exegetical exercise it may well be doubted whether the task of unravelling Pauline thought would have attracted him. It was one which yielded little romance; there were no prodigies to tilt at, no hoary legends to explode. He was, indeed, conscious that comment upon the apostolic writings took him away from his true métier, and before he had emerged from the task it is evident that the spectacle of Matthew Arnold perched in a pulpit, in Geneva gown, preaching to the Nonconformists from their own favourite texts, and proving his own alternative

doctrine orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks,

had become a wonder to himself. One may venture the supposition that it was a sense of acute embarrassment, if not of actual despair, that caused him to stop in the midst of an abstruse disquisition on faith in order to protest: "The object of this treatise is not religious edification, but the true criticism of a great and misunderstood author."

He desired, in fact, that English Puritanism should "" return upon its own thoughts and upon the elements of its being," and he was convinced that a disinterested and unprejudiced outsider, such as he regarded himself, was specially qualified to persuade it so to do.

Nonconformity had representatives enough well able to revise its doctrinal basis, but they were unwilling to approach the subject with open mind. Puritanism being from its nature self-centred, it would not look without, and the fact that its existence was staked upon certain traditional conceptions disinclined it to expose these conceptions to the test of a new and objective criticism. Just as Literature and Dogma was undertaken as a prolegomenon to a new religion, so here criticism contemplated an ulterior purpose-that of showing the Nonconformists that because they based their Church organisations on an interpretation of scriptural doctrine which was in part erroneous and altogether inadequate, their continued separation was inconsequent and indefensible.

M. Renan had come to the conclusion that the three hundred years' reign which St. Paul had enjoyed, thanks to Protestantism, as the "Christian doctor par excellence" was nearing a close. Arnold held precisely the contrary opinion. It was Protestantism which was coming to an end, or at least the Protestantism which had established itself upon a misreading and a misunderstanding of the Apostle's writings. "Its organisations, strong and active as they look, are touched with the finger of death; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every week from thousands of pulpits, have in them no significance and no power for the progressive thought of humanity." Here, too, Ithuriel's spear and the Zeitgeist had done their work, and done

it with all the wonted efficiency. Arnold held, however, that St. Paul had never had justice done to him, and that both to his reputation and to that of Puritanism itself, were it but conscious of its interests, it could not but be of advantage that the old misconceptions should be removed and the Apostle's teaching be shown in its true light, proportions, and bearings. From this standpoint he claimed that:

"The reign of the real St. Paul is only beginning; his fundamental ideas, disengaged from the elaborate misconceptions with which Protestantism has overlaid them, will have an influence in the future greater than any which they have yet had,—an influence proportioned to their correspondence with a number of the deepest and most permanent facts of human nature itself." "

1

Here Nonconformity was at great disadvantage as compared with the Church of England. Since the Church of England existed before Protestantism, her doctrine contained much more than the specifically Protestant elements. Let everything that Protestantism had derived from the Reformers be taken away, and Arnold believed that all that was most valuable and most serviceable in religion would remain to the Church. It was different with the Puritan denominations, for these had been expressly created as organs for the propagation of Calvinistic and Arminian schemes of dogma.

1 Essay on St. Paul and Protestantism.