r:
and he had re-stated, in terminology of his own, what he conceived to be
St. Paul's teaching on Religion. This work was completed in 1870, and in
1871 he began to publish instalments of a book which appeared in 1873
under the title _Literature and Dogma_. The scope and purpose of this
book may best be given in his own words. It deals with "the relation of
Letters to Religion: their effect upon dogma, and the consequences of
this to religion." His object is "to reassure those who feel attachment
to Christianity, to the Bible, and who recognize the growing discredit
befalling miracles and the super-natural."

"If the people are to receive a religion of the Bible, we must find for
the Bible some other basis than that which the Churches assign to it, a
verifiable basis and not an assumption. This new religion of the Bible
the people may receive; the version now current of the religion of the
Bible they will not receive."

He sets out on this enterprise by repeating what he had said in _St.
Paul and Protestantism_ about the misunderstandings which had arisen
from affixing to certain phrases such as _grace, new birth_, and
_justification_, a fixed, rigid, and quasi-scientific meaning. "Terms
which with St. Paul are _literary_ terms, theologians have employed as
if they were _scientific_ terms." In saying this he goes no further than
several of his predecessors and contemporaries on the Liberal side in
theology. Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that
"Nothing in the Church's history has been more fertile in discord and
error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor."[49]
Bishop Hampden's much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at
stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from
schoolmen and mataphysicians. Dean Stanley's unrivalled powers of
literary exposition were consistently employed in the same endeavour. To
call Abraham a Sheikh was only an ingenious attempt at naturalizing
Genesis. But in _Literature and Dogma_ Arnold applies this method far
more fundamentally. According to him, even "God" is a literary term to
which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied. He pronounces,
without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in
reason for the idea that God is a "Person, the First Great Cause, the
moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe." We are not to dream
that He is a "Being who thinks and loves"; or that we can love Him o