ence to its intrinsic truth and weight, and the
other is expecting it."

Again, in _God and the Bible_, he has a most instructive passage on the
relation of the sexes. "Here," he says, "we are on ground where to walk
right is of vital concern to men, and where disasters are plentiful." He
speculates on that relation as it may be supposed to have subsisted in
the first ages of the human race, and tries to trace it down to the
point of time "where history and religion begin." "And at this point we
first find the Hebrew people, with polygamy still clinging to it as a
survival from the times of ignorance, but with the marriage-tie solidly
established, strict and sacred, as we see it between Abraham and Sara.
Presently this same Hebrew people, with that aptitude which
characterized it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order,
placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn
sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment: _Thou shalt not
commit adultery_." And again: "Such was Israel's genius for the ideas
of moral order and of right, such his intuition of the Eternal that
makes for righteousness, that he felt without a shadow of a doubt, and
said with the most impressive solemnity, that Free Love was--to speak,
again, like our modern philosopher--fatal to progress. _He knoweth not
that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of
hell._"

The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold
declared that his _Discourses in America_ was the book by which, of all
his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever
he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight,
for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and
Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.

When the odious Voltaire urged his followers to "Crush the Infamous," he
had in mind that virtue which is specially characteristic of
Christianity.[40] A century later Renan said: "Nature cares nothing for
chastity." _Les frivoles out peutetre raison_--"The gay people are
perhaps in the right." Against this doctrine of devils Arnold uttered a
protesting and a warning voice. He was--heaven knows!--no enemy to
France. All that is best in French literature and French life he admired
almost to excess. His sympathy with France was so keen that Sainte-Beuve
wrote to him--"Vous avez traverse notre vie et notre litterature par une
ligne interieure, pr