in Mr. Arnold’s clearer aether—­as whether they are adapted to his purpose of winning.  He manages here and there, indeed, in trying on his new conceptions of old truths, to be exquisitely offensive.  It will seem like trifling, and it will keenly wound, for instance, the person of ordinary piety, to have his “Holy Ghost,” his promised “Comforter,” called “the Paraclete that Jesus promised, the Muse of righteousness, the Muse of humanity,” and to have this solemn Mystery lightly offset against the literary Muse, “the same who no doubt visits the bishop of Gloucester when he sits in his palace meditating on Personality.”  But he becomes most elaborately and carefully outrageous when, combating this same idea of Personality in the Holy Trinity, he calls it “the fairy-tale of the three Lord Shaftesburys,” in allusion to a parable which he is at the pains of constructing about a first Lord Shaftesbury, who is a judge with a crowd of vile offenders, and a second Lord Shaftesbury, who takes their punishment, and a third Lord Shaftesbury, “who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner.”  This seems like the talk not of a man who wishes to convince, but who wishes to wound:  it appears to be completely parallel with the method of those dissenters, whom Mr. Arnold is never tired of inveighing against, who use invective because Christ used it, and who hurl epithets at a state church or titles.  As for the new light which Mr. Arnold has to shed on the Bible and religion, it is a recasting in his own way of the old interpretation.  He deals with miracles as Renan deals with them, believing that credence in “thaumaturgy” will drop off from the human mind as credence in witchcraft has done—­that Lazarus underwent resurrection, since, having found the Life, he had passed through the state of death.  The Hebrew God he believes to have been a conception, not positive and pictorial as ours is apt to be (influenced, perhaps, though Mr. Arnold does not say so, by the efforts of Christian art), but a tendency to righteousness, a current of superior virtue, plain enough to the Oriental mind without mere personality; yet it may be objected to this that the Oriental mind made for a personal God, when Jesus came, as delightedly as our Aryan race could do.  It is not, however, our purpose to expose much of Mr. Arnold’s theory.  It will be accepted by some as the last effectual mingling of literary grace and spiritual insight; but others, especially when they find him saying that conduct cannot be perfected except by culture, will think this work the sheep’s head and shoulders covering the bust of a Voltaire.

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Rhymes Atween Times.  By Thomas MacKellar.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott &Co.