0, Literature and Dogma, 1873, and God and the Bible, 1875, he
endeavoured to rescue that book from its orthodox exponents, whom he
regarded as the corrupters of Christianity. It would be just, he says,
"but hardly perhaps Christian," to fling back the word infidel at the
orthodox theologians for their bad literary and scientific criticisms of
the Bible and to speak of "the torrent of infidelity which pours every
Sunday from our pulpits!" The corruption of Christianity has been due to
theology "with its insane licence of affirmation about God, its insane
licence of affirmation about immortality"; to the hypothesis of "a
magnified and non-natural man at the head of mankind's and the world's
affairs"; and the fancy account of God "made up by putting scattered
expressions of the Bible together and taking them literally." He
chastises with urbane persiflage the knowledge which the orthodox think
they possess about the proceedings and plans of God. "To think they know
what passed in the Council of the

[220] Trinity is not hard to them; they could easily think they even
knew what were the hangings of the Trinity's council-chamber." Yet "the
very expression, the Trinity, jars with the whole idea and character of
Bible-religion; but, lest the Socinian should be unduly elated at
hearing this, let us hasten to add that so too, and just as much, does
the expression, a great Personal First Cause." He uses God as the least
inadequate name for that universal order which the intellect feels after
as a law, and the heart feels after as a benefit; and defines it as "the
stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their
being." He defined it further as a Power that makes for righteousness,
and thus went considerably beyond the agnostic position. He was
impatient of the minute criticism which analyzes the Biblical documents
and discovers inconsistencies and absurdities, and he did not appreciate
the importance of the comparative study of religions. But when we read
of a dignitary in a recent Church congress laying down that the
narratives in the books of Jonah and Daniel must be accepted because
Jesus quoted them, we may wish that Arnold were here to reproach the
orthodox for "want of intellectual seriousness."

These years also saw the appearance of

[221] Mr. John Morley's sympathetic studies of the French freethinkers
of the eighteenth century, Voltaire (1872), Rousseau (1873), and Diderot
(1878). He edited th