y are remitted; whosesoever sins ye
retain, they are retained.'" The one formula seems to Arnold
anachronistic and unlikely, the other perfectly natural. This is all
very interesting and may be very true; but it is too dogmatic to be
convincing. In such a case one may respectfully cry out that Letters are
overstepping their province; and that one man's sense of fitness,
style, and literary likelihood is not sufficient warrant for
discrediting a well-tested and established document.

[Illustration: Matthew Arnold, 1884

_Photo Elliott & Fry_]

Yet, after all, documents, however well-tested and established, are not
the backbone of the Christian religion. It may well be that to minds
inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in "the
Bible and the Bible only" as the ground of their religion; Arnold's
solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and
revolutionary. But they fell harmless on the minds which had long
schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible
from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that
what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was
contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the
Canon were resolved into mere literature.

Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical
disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived
to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal
to History. He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters
with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed. It was easy enough
to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop
Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who
write to the _Guardian_. But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone,
with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority;
and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by
saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy
fashion, that "it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these
matters satisfactorily."

But, though clergymen are thus put quietly out of court, a layman may
still be heard; and one could almost wish that he had lived to handle,
in some fresh preface to _Literature and Dogma_, such a confession of
faith as that which Lord Salisbury gave in 1894--

"To me, the central point is the Resurrection