For Mr. Arnold deprecates
the idea of a personal god, likens the Christian Trinity to three Lord
Shaftesburys, and says that the Bible miracles must all be given up
without reservation. All the positive religion he leaves us is the
belief in "An eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness," which
is about as nebulous a creed as ever was preached. Now Mr. Arnold is not
an insignificant person. He is recognised as a past-master of English
letters, a ripe scholar, a fine poet, and an exquisite critic. When such
a man carries destructive criticism to its utmost limits, we may well
congratulate ourselves on a signal triumph of Freethought. And we may
also find comfort in the fact that nobody thinks of flinging a stone
at Mr. Arnold for his heresy. By-and-by the censors of religion in the
press will cease to throw stones at the Freethought teachers among the
masses of the people, who only put into homlier English and publish in a
cheaper form the sentiments and ideas which Mr. Arnold expresses for the
educated classes at a higher price and in a loftier style.

During the winter a gap was made in the front rank of English literature
by the deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot. Neither of these great
writers was orthodox. Carlyle was a Freethinker to the extent of
discarding Christian supernaturalism. Very early in his life he told
Edward Irving that he did not, nor was it likely he ever would, regard
Christianity as he did. We all remember, too, his scornful references to
Hebrew Old Clothes, and his fierce diatribes against the clergy who,
he said, went about with strange gear on their heads, and underneath it
such a theory of the universe as he, for one, was thankful to have no
concern with. In the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" he likened Christianity to
a great tree, sprung from the seed of Nazareth, and since fed by the
opulences of fifty generations; which now is perishing at the root, and
sways to and fro ever farther and farther from the perpendicular; and
which in the end must come down, and leave to those who found shelter
beneath it and thought it infinite, a wholesome view of the upper
eternal lights. And his contempt for controversial or dogmatic theology
may be gauged by his reply to one who asked him whether he was a
Pantheist. "No," said Carlyle, "never was; nor a Pot-Theist either."

George Eliot was notoriously a Freethinker. Early in her literary career
she translated Strauss and Feuerback into English, and thr