s generally conceived by us." Stress must be laid upon those
last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is
the perfection and consecration of man's whole nature, intellectual and
physical, as well as moral and spiritual. All that is lovely, splendid,
moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life--all health and vigour and
beauty and cleverness and charm--all nature and all art, all science and
all literature--are among the good and perfect gifts which come down
from the Father of Lights. But this is just the conception of Religion
which Puritanism never grasped--nay, rather which Puritanism definitely
rejected." And here probably is the origin of that quarrel with
Puritanism, at least in its more superficial and obvious aspects, which
so coloured and sometimes barbed Arnold's meditations on Religion. "As I
have said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who
live in and for it--so I say with regard to the religious organizations.
Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the _Nonconformist_--a
life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings
of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of human life
completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after
sweetness, light, and perfection!"

So much then for his definition of Culture; and we must admit that "the
old Liberal hacks," the speakers on Liberal platforms, and the writers
in Liberal papers, were not without excuse when they failed so utterly
to divine what the new Teacher meant by harping on a word which Bacon
and Pope had used in so different a sense.

Chapter II is headed "Doing as One Likes." And here it was that our new
critic came most sharply into conflict with our cherished beliefs. We
believed in the liberty which Milton loved, "to know, to utter, and to
argue freely, according to conscience," and to frame our action by sole
reference to our conviction. We believed that of such liberty there was
only one endurable limit, and that was the condition that no man should
so use his own liberty as to lessen his brother's--and the liberty thus
conceived we regarded as the supreme boon of human life, for which no
other could conceivably be taken in exchange. And now came the new
Teacher of Liberalism with a doctrine which, while it made us angry,
also set us thinking. "Our familiar praise of the British Constitution
under which we live, is that it is a system of checks-