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CHAPTER VII

ND here, too, Arnold's master-key is culture. His criticism aims simply at discovering how culture, when left to go its own way, unforced, unprejudiced, unimpeded, will view religion and the problems which religion involves. It was his conviction that the failure of theologians to study religion by the method of culture was largely responsible for the prevalent divorce between reason and faith. A broad literary criticism could alone remove the difficulties which literary misapprehension had created. Yet lest any one should think lightly of the instrument which he brings to his aid, he points out that literary criticism means much more than verbal quibbling about verbal obscurities, and that the light which he seeks is not merely that which a universal knowledge of books throws upon the chief of books.

"calls into play

"This literary criticism," he says, the highest requisites for the study of letters; great and wide acquaintance with the history of the human mind, knowledge of the manner in which men have

thought, of their way of using words and of what they mean by them, delicacy of perception and quick tact, and besides all these a favourable moment and the Zeitgeist."

To the Zeitgeist and Arnold's ponderous veneration for it a word must be devoted in passing, and perhaps more conveniently here than later. The feeling which Arnold entertained for the Time-Spirit bordered on awe. Its power and authority nothing and no one can withstand; neither miracle nor superstition of any kind; before it the hoariest systems of thought crumble and decay; it is an unfailing revealer of the bubble reputation. Butler's Analogy has enjoyed the profound respect of many generations, but even that

great work, on which such immense praise has been lavished," is vulnerable: "It seemed once to have a spell and a power; but the Zeitgeist breathes upon it and we rub our eyes, and it has the spell and the power no longer." The Zeitgeist was to Arnold, in fact, a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy,-the only one which he recognised,—and to it he attributed a more wonderful influence upon the human mind than was ever exercised by the special supernaturalism against which he contended. Here for once his superiority to the common credulity of our weak nature failed him.

It has been counted little short of presumption in Arnold that he, a layman, with no special training in

1 Literature and Dogma, chapter vi.

'Last Essays: Essay on "Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist,” ii.

theological scholastic, should have essayed a task so ambitious as this. And almost it might appear as though he had long before by anticipation denied his own competency to interfere in controversy of the kind. For the gravamen of his case against Bishop Colenso was expressed in the sentence: "Let us have all the science there is from the men of science, from the men of religion let us have religion." But whether Arnold was right or wrong in refusing free speech to Colenso, these words cannot reasonably be construed in a negative sense as implying that the man who is neither a professed scientist nor a professed theologian, however high his qualifications may otherwise be, shall necessarily hold no opinions at all, or at least shall not utter them, touching either of these branches of knowledge. Such a contention would be just as sensible as the claim that no man should judge poetry unless he could write verse, music unless he were a composer, or fiction unless he had produced novels of his own. A theologian Arnold was not and did not pretend to be, but then his purpose in writing was not specifically theological either. He was willing to believe that of theology the world already had enough, and that less. rather than more would be an improvement; all that he presumed to do was to take the theological dogmas which had been deduced from the Bible and still enjoyed living currency, and submit them to such an investigation as fell to the province of a literary critic, which he did profess to be.

But, further, it is a fair claim that as a lay critic he possessed the advantage over the professed theologian that he was able to come to this investigation with a perfectly open mind-with no preconception to confirm, no thesis to establish, no dogma to defend; in a word, with nothing to prove. Freely and conclusively might illustrations be cited to show how much easier it is for the lay than the professional mind to grasp large spiritual conceptions. The boldest essays in the interpretation of religion, those breathing the most generous spirit, freest from exclusiveness and provinciality, and marked by the broadest synthesis of human experience, have come not from theologians and ecclesiasts, but from poets and philosophers, since these have ever been able to bring to the study of phenomena in themselves so absorbingly subjective the greatest degree of mental detachment and disinterestedness. Every one knows how much the milder and more tolerant judgment of Mohammedanism and other non-Christian religions professed amongst English people in recent days is due to the simple candour with which Carlyle brushed aside the idea of an exclusively Christian revelation as opposed to any large survey of human thought and of civilisation.

Arnold's attitude to other religions was no less sympathetic, and it is well expressed by that wide-hearted utterance in the poem Progress, an utterance marked by all the catholicity of Pope's Universal Prayer, while free from its vague impersonal rhetoric :

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye

For ever doth accompany mankind,

Hath look'd on no religion scornfully

That men did ever find.

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?
Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain?
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man :

"Thou must be born again"?

And in general it would appear to be natural to the disinterested lay mind to view mankind as an indivisible whole, and its spiritual atmosphere, however various in density, as a common element, and to approach the problems of religion from this universal standpoint.'

Arnold's attitude and the movement of thought to

In his work, The Philosophy of the Christian Religion (1902), Principal A. M. Fairbairn relates how it was a visit to India that convinced him that this was the only tenable position. "In India,” he writes, “the author suddenly found himself face to face with a religion he had studied in its literature and by the help of interpreters of many minds and tongues, and this contact with reality at once illumined him and perplexed him. It was not so much that his knowledge was incorrect or false as that it was mistaken in its emphasis." So he came to the conclusion: "If great historical religions which innumerable millions of men, as rational as we, have professed through thousands of ages, be resolved into systems of error and delusion that only the blind deceitfulness of the human heart could tempt man to believe, then it is evident that we dare not use the reason or the conscience which we have so discredited either to believe or to attest or to justify the truth of our own. In other words, the philosophy that misreads the origin of religious ideas and the history of any religion will not, and indeed cannot, be just to the Christian; while he who would maintain the Christian must be just and even generous to all the religions created and professed of men." (See Preface, ix.)