will seem like trifling,
and it will keenly wound, for instance, the person of ordinary piety,
to have his "Holy Ghost," his promised "Comforter," called "the
Paraclete that Jesus promised, the Muse of righteousness, the Muse of
humanity," and to have this solemn Mystery lightly offset against the
literary Muse, "the same who no doubt visits the bishop of Gloucester
when he sits in his palace meditating on Personality." But he becomes
most elaborately and carefully outrageous when, combating this same
idea of Personality in the Holy Trinity, he calls it "the fairy-tale
of the three Lord Shaftesburys," in allusion to a parable which he is
at the pains of constructing about a first Lord Shaftesbury, who is a
judge with a crowd of vile offenders, and a second Lord Shaftesbury,
who takes their punishment, and a third Lord Shaftesbury, "who keeps
very much in the background and works in a very occult manner." This
seems like the talk not of a man who wishes to convince, but who
wishes to wound: it appears to be completely parallel with the method
of those dissenters, whom Mr. Arnold is never tired of inveighing
against, who use invective because Christ used it, and who hurl
epithets at a state church or titles. As for the new light which Mr.
Arnold has to shed on the Bible and religion, it is a recasting in
his own way of the old interpretation. He deals with miracles as Renan
deals with them, believing that credence in "thaumaturgy" will drop
off from the human mind as credence in witchcraft has done--that
Lazarus underwent resurrection, since, having found the Life, he had
passed through the state of death. The Hebrew God he believes to have
been a conception, not positive and pictorial as ours is apt to
be (influenced, perhaps, though Mr. Arnold does not say so, by the
efforts of Christian art), but a tendency to righteousness, a current
of superior virtue, plain enough to the Oriental mind without mere
personality; yet it may be objected to this that the Oriental mind
made for a personal God, when Jesus came, as delightedly as our Aryan
race could do. It is not, however, our purpose to expose much of Mr.
Arnold's theory. It will be accepted by some as the last effectual
mingling of literary grace and spiritual insight; but others,
especially when they find him saying that conduct cannot be perfected
except by culture, will think this work the sheep's head and shoulders
covering the bust of a Voltaire.

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