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“I must be cruel, only to be kind,” says Hamlet.  In a different sense the kindness of some people is pretty sure to be cruel, their very charity ferocious.  There is a story of an old maiden lady whose affection was centred on an ugly little cur, which one morning bounded into her room with a biscuit in his chops.  “Here, Jane,” cries the good lady, twisting the tidbit out of his mouth and giving it to her maid, “throw away the bread—­it may be poisoned; or stop, put it in your pocket, and give it to the first poor little beggar you find in the street!” The story is hardly overdrawn, for if “all mankind’s concern is charity,” as Pope says, yet at least some of mankind’s methods of exhibiting generosity are questionable.  An English paper recounts that a Croydon pork-butcher was lately arrested for selling diseased pork, and the man from whom he bought the pig, being summoned as a witness, admitted that the animal had been killed “because it was not very well”—­that he was just about to bury the carcass when the butcher opportunely came and bought it; but the strange point is that, in a burst of munificence, “the head had already been given to a poor woman who lived near.”  Evidently, the worthy pair thought this to be the sort of charity that covers a multitude of sins; and to a question whether their intents, as a whole, were wicked or charitable, they might properly have answered “Both.”  The “charities that soothe and heal and bless” are not the only ones that pass current under the general form of almsgiving.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Literature and Dogma:  An Essay toward a Better Apprehension of the Bible.  By Matthew Arnold.  Boston:  James R. Osgood & Co.

This is a tract issued in the author’s apprehension that our popular view of Christianity is false, our conception of the Hebrew and Greek Bible altogether hidebound and deadening, our notion of the Deity a picture that is doomed to destruction in the face of science.  As it is a sincere scheme of individual opinion (though not of original opinion, being largely made up of graftings from a certain recognizable class of modern scholars), it could only be finally disposed of by following it up root and branch in nearly all its details, at the cost of writing a much larger book.  No opponent will be likely to give it so much importance.  For our part, we are quite content to exhibit a little tableau of the main theory advanced, and let this tableau speak for itself.

We should perhaps begin with Mr. Arnold’s matter, but it is hard to represent him at all without doing some preliminary justice to his manner—­his attitude toward the Christian public, his dogma of urbanity, and the value of his way of putting things as a likelihood of making converts.  This is the more appropriate as he thinks the Founder of Christianity, and its chief promulgators, such as Peter and Paul,