irreligion. One of these
called Christianity "that awful plague which has destroyed two
civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is
now struggling to live amongst men." Of that teacher, and of others like
him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one
could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such
of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists,
at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was
quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account
of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half
Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong,
was coming in. And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be
compassionated than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as
several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and representatives are. For
perhaps the younger men of the Party may take heart of grace, and
acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is
by no means over. But, for the older ones, their mental habits are
formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies.
However, a wave of religious reaction _is_ evidently passing over
Europe, due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends
having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when
it was neither the one nor the other."

[Illustration: Oriel College, Oxford

In March, 1845, Matthew Arnold was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

A study of Arnold's work ought to give something more than a sketch of
the prose-book by which he most powerfully affected the thinking of his
time, and we will therefore take the contents of _Culture and Anarchy_
chapter by chapter. The Preface is only a summary of the book, and may
therefore be disregarded. The Introduction briefly points out the
foolishness of orators and leader-writers who had assumed that Culture
meant "a smattering of Greek and Latin," and then addresses itself to
the task of finding a better definition. "I propose now to try and
enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my taste
and my powers, what Culture really is, what good it can do, what is our
own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some plain grounds on
which a faith in Culture--both my own faith in it and the faith of
others--may rest secu