CHAPTER VI

THEOLOGY

SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, Bishop of Oxford, after hearing a sermon by Dr. Howson, Dean of Chester, wrote thus in his diary: "One good bitthat the emptying Christianity of dogma would perish it, like Charlemagne's face when exhumed." It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry-October 5, 1869-that the good Dean's ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold's first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and the Philosopher he quizzed Colenso, "the arithmetical bishop who couldn't forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers," 1 about his "jejune and technical manner of dealing with Biblical controversy." "It

1 A saying attributed to Bishop Wilberforce.

is," he wrote, "a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different things. The multitude will for ever confuse them. . . . Dr. Colenso, in his first volume, did all he could to strengthen the confusion, and to make it dangerous." "Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion."

But in that earlier essay he had merely criticised a critic; he had not originated criticisms of his own. So he had touched the field of theological controversy, but had not appeared on it as a performer. That now he so appeared was probably due to the success which attended Culture and Anarchy. The publication of that book had immensely extended the circle of his audience. Those who care for literature are few; those who care for politics are many. And, though the politics of Culture and Anarchy were new and strange, hard to be understood, and running in all directions off the beaten track, still the professional politicians, and that class of ordinary citizens which aims at cultivation and seeks a wider knowledge, took note of Culture and Anarchy as a book which must be read, and which, though they might not always understand it, would at least show them which way the wind was blowing. The present writer perfectly recalls the comfortable figure of

a genial merchant, returned from business to his suburban villa, and saying: "Well, I shall spend this Saturday afternoon on Mat Arnold's new book, and I shall not understand one word of it." It had never occurred to the good man that he was either a Hebraizer or a Hellenizer. He had always believed that he was a Liberal, a Low Churchman, and a silk-mercer.

For Arnold to find that he was in possession of a pulpit-that he had secured a position from which he could preach his doctrine with a certainty that it would be heard and pondered, if not accepted-was a new and an invigorating experience. He at once began to make the most of his opportunity. While the Press was still teeming with criticisms of Culture and Anarchy, he began to extend his activities from the field of political and social criticism to that of theological controversy. The latter experiment seems to have grown spontaneously out of the former. In Culture and Anarchy he had charged Puritanism with imagining that in the Bible it had, as its own special possession, a unum necessarium, which made it independent of Sweetness and Light, and guided it aright without the aid of culture. "The dealings," he said, "of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul afford a noteworthy illustration of this. Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that

apostle's greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final."

This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they relied; and more particularly of St. Paul. And this particular direction seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently published, of Renan: "After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.'

Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them the text of his treatise on St. Paul and Protestantism, which began to appear in October, 1869. 'St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.

Precisely the con

trary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end; . . . but the real reign of St. Paul is only beginning."

In Culture and Anarchy he had shown how "the over-Hebraizing of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and impair its

vision that even the documents which it thinks allsufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible." And he showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer's. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, "instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and Puritanism; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism. "The Church of Engiand," he says, "existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism." Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and there show themselves in her documents, "and all which is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain "; whereas those schemes are the very life and substance of Puritanism and the Puritan