it down is a sign of decline.  “Now, at last, your creed is decaying.  People have discovered that you know nothing about it; that heaven and hell belong to dreamland; that the impertinent young curate who tells me that I shall be burnt everlastingly for not sharing his superstition is just as ignorant as I am myself, and that I know as much as my dog.  And then you calmly say again, ’It is all a mistake.  Only believe in a something —­and we will make it as easy for you as possible.  Hell shall have no more than a fine equable temperature, really good for the constitution; there shall be nobody in it except Judas Iscariot and one or two others; and even the poor Devil shall have a chance if he will resolve to mend his ways.’ "

Mr. Matthew Arnold may, I suppose, be numbered among the agnostics, but he was

[219] of a very different type.  He introduced a new kind of criticism of the Bible—­literary criticism.  Deeply concerned for morality and religion, a supporter of the Established Church, he took the Bible under his special protection, and in three works, St. Paul and Protestantism, 1870, Literature and Dogma, 1873, and God and the Bible, 1875, he endeavoured to rescue that book from its orthodox exponents, whom he regarded as the corrupters of Christianity.  It would be just, he says, “but hardly perhaps Christian,” to fling back the word infidel at the orthodox theologians for their bad literary and scientific criticisms of the Bible and to speak of “the torrent of infidelity which pours every Sunday from our pulpits!” The corruption of Christianity has been due to theology “with its insane licence of affirmation about God, its insane licence of affirmation about immortality”; to the hypothesis of “a magnified and non-natural man at the head of mankind’s and the world’s affairs”; and the fancy account of God “made up by putting scattered expressions of the Bible together and taking them literally.”  He chastises with urbane persiflage the knowledge which the orthodox think they possess about the proceedings and plans of God.  “To think they know what passed in the Council of the

[220] Trinity is not hard to them; they could easily think they even knew what were the hangings of the Trinity’s council-chamber.”  Yet “the very expression, the Trinity, jars with the whole idea and character of Bible-religion; but, lest the Socinian should be unduly elated at hearing this, let us hasten to add that so too, and just as much, does the expression, a great Personal First Cause.”  He uses God as the least inadequate name for that universal order which the intellect feels after as a law, and the heart feels after as a benefit; and defines it as “the stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their being.”  He defined it further as a Power that makes for righteousness, and thus went considerably beyond the agnostic position.  He was impatient of the minute criticism which analyzes the Biblical documents and discovers inconsistencies and absurdities, and he did not appreciate the importance of the comparative study of religions.  But when we read of a dignitary in a recent Church congress laying down that the narratives in the books of Jonah and Daniel must be accepted because Jesus quoted them, we may wish that Arnold were here to reproach the orthodox for “want of intellectual seriousness.”