gained most of their successes through manner.
“Mildness and sweet reasonableness” he
believes to be the characteristic of Christ’s
teaching—a presentment of truths long afloat
in the Jewish mind so winningly and persuasively that
they became new and profound convictions in all minds;
and he believes that when these characteristics were
withdrawn or veiled the teaching was so far ineffectual;
that when Christ, addressing the Pharisees, abandoned
“the mild, uncontentious, winning, inward mode
of working,” there was no chance at all of His
gaining the persons at whom His sayings were launched;
and that Saint Paul certainly had no chance of convincing
those whom he calls “dogs.” Now, it
is inevitable for us to ask ourselves what chance
Mr. Arnold, undertaking the most delicate and critical
crusade that can possibly be imagined against the dearest
opinions of almost everybody, will have with his
method. The hard hits which the Pharisees got,
and which the early churches sometimes received from
Paul, were direct, terrible blows, adapted to a primitive
age: Mr. Arnold’s hits, full of grace and
sting, are adapted to our own age, and are rather
worse. When he calls Pius IX. the amiable old
pessimist in Saint Peter’s chair, or when he
calls Dr. Marsh, an Anglican divine who had hung in
the railway stations some sets of biblical questions
and answers which he does not approve, a “venerable
and amiable Coryphaeus of our evangelical party,”
he uses expressions that will lash the ordinary Catholic
and Churchman of his audience harder than the fisherwoman
was lashed in being called an isosceles and a parallelopipedon.
Not much more “sweetly reasonable” will
he seem to the ordinary Cantab. when he says that the
Cambridge addiction to muscularity would have sent
the college, but for the Hebrew religion, “in
procession, vice-chancellor, bedels, masters, scholars,
and all, in spite of the professor of modern philosophy,
to the temple of Aphrodite;” nor anymore “sweetly
reasonable” will he seem to the ordinary innocent,
conventional Churchman in asserting that the God of
righteousness is displeased and disserved by men uttering
such doggerel hymns as “Out of my stony griefs
Bethel I’ll raise,” and “My Jesus
to know, and feel His blood flow;” or in asserting
that the modern preacher, who calls people infidels
for false views of the Bible, should have the epithet
returned upon him for his own false views; and that
it would be just for us to say, “The bishop
of So-and-so, the dean of So-and-so, and other infidel
laborers of the present day;” or “That
rampant infidel, the archdeacon of So-and-so, in his
recent letter on the Athanasian creed;” or “The
Rock, the Church Times, and the rest of
the infidel press;” or “The torrent of
infidelity which pours every Sunday from our pulpits!
Just it would be,” pursues the author, “and
by no means inurbane; but hardly, perhaps, Christian.”
The question is not so much whether such allocutions
are Christian—which they possibly may be