eatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has
Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful,
and to give it canons of truth absolute and final."

This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of
it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the
Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they
relied; and more particularly of St. Paul. And this particular direction
seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently
published, of Renan: "After having been for three hundred years, thanks
to Protestantism, the Christian doctor _par excellence_, Paul is now
coming to an end of his reign."

Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them
the text of his treatise on _St. Paul and Protestantism_, which began to
appear in October, 1869. "_St. Paul is now coming to an end of his
reign._ Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to
which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism
which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the
real reign of St. Paul is only beginning."

In _Culture and Anarchy_ he had shown how "the over-Hebraizing of
Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and
impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks
all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself,
it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something
quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, who knows
nothing else, knows even his Bible." And he showed how readers of the
Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which
was not the writer's. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path,
and, "instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us
see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible
from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the
treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour _St. Paul and
Protestantism_, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise
itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and _Puritanism_; and this he does
because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special
representation of Protestantism. "The Church of England," he says,
"existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism."
Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and t