wicked world,
went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of
a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany. "A great creed, with the
testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an
articulate word to say in its defence.... What weapons the Rector
wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line
been recorded."[50]

A happily-conceived picture--was it in _Punch_?--represented the Rector
on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, "Pray,
pray, don't mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to
resign my living." However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere
apparently read _Literature and Dogma_, and, when he came to "Miracles
do not happen" he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold
would have called "a hole-and-corner" religion of his own.

Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious
character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to
describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really
describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out.
This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend
Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands
for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the
author's observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold's dogma
about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of
a different type--a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be
conceived--might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would
not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are
not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that
it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great
purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy,
had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so
unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal
God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into
the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and
strikingly dissimilar to the established order--in common parlance,
miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses--some rough and
popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and
scientific--appeared in great numbers. "Grave objections are alleged
against