no development? And what is all this but the very feeding and stimulating of our ordinary self, instead of the annulling of it?" 1

A hard saying, but is it untrue? And the chief explanation lies in the dependence of the voluntary system of religion upon its adherents, by whose sole efforts it stands or falls. The Established Church goes on of necessity, for it is part of the machinery of government, like the Crown, Parliament, and the tax-gatherer; the unestablished chapel, on the other hand, exists for its special adherents, yet they no less for it. Hence it is that the individual plays so much larger a part in the religious activities of Nonconformity than he does in those of the Establishment, that amalgam of individualities in which, by a natural process of self-effacement, entirely unconscious yet entirely effectual, the single life and the single energy are merged, and so subordinated to universal ends. Where the Anglican layman says "Better to serve in Rome than rule in a province," the Nonconformist says "Better to rule in a province than serve in Rome." The cynic might say -has said that for practical purposes both Church and Nonconformity are under pontifical government, with only a difference in the seat of authority, the one placing it in the pulpit and the other in the pew. It is more true, perhaps, that they stand in the relationship of oligarchy to republic. Not only so, but in each case the disadvantages as well as the advantages of the 1 1 Essay on "Modern Dissent" in St. Paul and Protestantism.

form of government chosen are freely experienced; and, chiefly, that in the Church the subject is not enough. a citizen, in Nonconformity the citizen is too much a king.

It was such considerations as these the retarding influence of isolation, the temptation to which every sect is exposed of magnifying its own doctrine and falling into the spirit of self-satisfaction and even of selfrighteousness, and, not least, the special encouragement given by popular systems of Church government to self-assertion - which led Arnold to advance the claim that membership of a national Church is of itself a lesson in religious moderation and for that reason a definite help on the way to culture and harmonious perfection of life. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious life of his nation, and while he may be sure that within those forms the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction he has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well." Comparing his position with that of the Nonconformist, he sees loss in every direction: "The sectary's 'eigene grosse Erfindungen,' as Goethe calls them-the precious discoveries. of himself and his friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in peculiar forms of their own cannot but, as he has voluntarily chosen them, and is personally responsible for them, fill his

whole mind. He is zealous to do battle for them and affirm them; for in affirming them he affirms himself, and that is what we all like. Other sides of his being are thus neglected, because the religious side, always tending in every serious man to predominance over our other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and tyrannous by the condition of self-assertion and challenge which he has chosen for himself. And just what is not essential in religion he comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times the more readily because he has chosen it of himself; and religious activity he fancies to consist in battling for it." 1

Has the Nonconformist, then, no hope of attaining to a larger life and a more generous conception of things short of forsaking his Nonconformity? Nowhere does Arnold suggest such renouncement as essential. All he claims is that to pursue the old self-centred course is harmful. "It is not fatal to the Nonconformists," he writes, "to remain with their separated churches; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that theirs is the one true way of worshipping God, that provincialism and loss of totality have not come to them from following it, or that provincialism and loss of totality are not evils." '

' Preface to Culture and Anarchy.

• Ibid.

'N spite of his open heterodoxy, Arnold was to the last

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staunch in his Churchmanship. He has told us how in his Oxford days the Church of England was for him and his friends "the most national and natural institution in the world," and the attachment and the sentiment underlying it never weakened. True, he has strong things to say about Anglicanism at times. Some of his strictures in A French Eton, indeed, fall short of justice, and should not be accepted as a final verdict. "It is not easy," he writes there, "for a reflecting man who has studied its origin to feel any vehement enthusiasm for Anglicanism; Henry VIII. and his Parliament have taken care of that. One may esteem it as a beneficial social and civilising agent. One may have an affection for it from life-long associations, and for the sake of much that is venerable and interesting which it has inherited from antiquity. One may cherish gratitude for it . for the shelter and basis for culture which this, like other great nationally established forms of religion, affords; those who

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are born in them can get forward on their road, instead of always eyeing the ground on which they stand and disputing about it. But actual Anglicanism is certainly not Jerusalem, and I should be sorry to think it the end which Nonconformity and the middle class are to reach."

But in so writing Arnold was concerned to discredit the suspicion that in urging Nonconformity to pay more attention to education he desired to hold up Anglicanism as the goal of his crusade of culture. His truer attitude must be sought in the Sion College address to the London clergy in 1876, in which he goes to great pains to disprove the accusation of hostility to the Church, an accusation" totally erroneous." On the contrary, he claims that he has consistently striven to co-operate with the Church in the carrying out of its special mission, which is simply and solely "the promotion of goodness . . . . through the most effective means possible, the only means which are really and truly effectual for the object: through the means of the Christian religion and the Bible." He even goes so far as to confess the relative unimportance of his religious criticisms when compared with the practical work of helping to make crooked natures straight.

'Of this address, given on February 22, 1876, and reprinted in Last Essays, he wrote two days afterwards: "My address went off very well. It was of no use speaking at Sion College unless I could in some degree carry my audience with me, and I did carry them. . . . The President said that to someone who had expressed his astonishment at my being in