he moral nature of man. He made a daring plea
for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul
let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are
sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint
men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was
by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety,
the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his
doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of God in man, of the
divineness of life, of God's judgment and mercy in the order of the
world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious
teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not
philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its
application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable
tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy
in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in
flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either,
in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.

ARNOLD

What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty
years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great
difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the
English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing.
He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one
to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early
for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the
scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often
boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have
mentioned the fact. The assumption that whatever is true can be verified
in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies
is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was
devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion,
but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation
of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold
pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he yet holds to the
conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for
righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.

Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such a