m. And it is well for him that all
they can do is to effect some deduction from the fame which has been
earned by him in other fields, as a true man, a searching and sagacious
literary critic, and a poet of genuine creative genius."[55]

It is now time to enquire what practical effect he produced by all this
writing (and a good deal which followed it in the same sense) on the
religious thought of his time. This is a question which, in the absence
of any clear or general testimony, one can only answer by the light of
one's own experience. The present writer can aver that, so far as his
own personal knowledge goes, the strange case of Robert Elsmere was a
unique instance. He has, of course, known plenty of people to whom,
alas! revealed Religion--the accepted Faith of the Church and the
Gospel--was a tale of no meaning, which they regarded either with blank
indifference or with bitter and furious hostility. But, in all these
cases, dissent from the Christian creed depended upon negations far
deeper than "Miracles do not happen." It depended on a stark incapacity
to conceive the ideas of God, of permitted evil, of sin, its
consequences and its remedy, and of life after death. Where there was
the capacity to conceive these mysteries, men were not troubled by the
minor questions of miracle, prophecy, and textual research. To use an
illustration which the present writer has used elsewhere, they were not
shaken by _Robert Elsmere_, not confirmed by _Lux Mundi_. Still less
were they agitated by the literary dogmaticism of Matthew Arnold. Many
people disliked his style, his methods, his illustrations; and, not
knowing the man, disliked him also. But, as he justly observed, if he
had written as these objectors wished him to write, no one would have
read him; so he went on in his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" way; and the
people who disliked him closed their ears, and "flocked all the more
eagerly to Messrs. Moody and Sankey."

Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1895--"It is very difficult to keep one's temper
in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches on religious matters. His
patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive
and trying than rank unbelief."

But then again there were those--and we should hope the great
majority--who, whether they knew the man or not, loved his temper,
admired his methods, and found no more difficulty in detaching what was
good from what was bad in his teaching, than he himself found in