writings, of which St. Paul and Protestantism, 1870, and Literature and Dogma, 1873, are the most important, is the same, to show the natural truth of religion and to strengthen its position by freeing it from dependence on dogma and historical evidence, and especially to make clear the essential value of Christianity.  Conformity with reason, true spirituality, and freedom from materialistic interpretation were for him the bases of sound faith.  That Arnold’s religious writing is thoroughly spiritual in its aim and tendency has, I think, never been questioned, and we need only examine some of his leading definitions to become convinced of this.  Thus, religion is described as “that which binds and holds us to the practice of righteousness”; faith is the “power, preeminently, of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness”; God is “the power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness”; immortality is a union of one’s life with an eternal order that never dies.  Arnold did not without reluctance enter into religious controversy, but when once entered he did his best to make order and reason prevail there.  His attitude is well stated in an early essay not since reprinted:—­

“And you are masters in Israel, and know not these things; and you require a voice from the world of literature to tell them to you!  Those who ask nothing better than to remain silent on such topics, who have to quit their own sphere to speak of them, who cannot touch them without being reminded that they survive those who touched them with far different power, you compel, in the mere interest of letters, of intelligence, of general culture, to proclaim truths which it was your function to have made familiar.  And when you have thus forced the very stones to cry out, and the dumb to speak, you call them singular because they know these truths, and arrogant because they declare them!"[1]

In political discussion as in all other forms of criticism Arnold aimed at disinterestedness.  “I am a Liberal,” he says in the Introduction to Culture and Anarchy, “yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and self-renouncement.”  In the last condition he believed that his particular strength lay.  “I do not wish to see men of culture entrusted with power.”  In his coolness and freedom from bitterness is to be found his chief superiority to his more violent contemporaries.  This saved him from magnifying the faults inseparable from the social movements of his day.  In contrast with Carlyle he retains to the end a sympathy with the advance of democracy and a belief in the principles of liberty and equality, while not blinded to the weaknesses of Liberalism.  Political discussion in the hands of its express partisans is always likely to become violent and one-sided.  This violence and one-sidedness Arnold believes it the work of criticism to temper, or as he expresses it, in Culture and Anarchy, “Culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,—­its fierceness and its addiction to an abstract system.”