That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there—­in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude—­can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold “good form” to be, as somebody or other puts it, “an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties.”  But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the “citations and illustrations” which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also.  We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe’er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its “science got ruffled by fighting.”  These things, as “form,” class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto, and passes on.  Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire.  It would be cruel to bring Literature and Dogma into competition with A Tale of a Tub; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with Le Taureau blanc.  And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.

In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable “science,” Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror.  This new La Fontaine asking everybody, “Avez-vous lu Kuenen?” is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found.  “The prophecy of the details of Peter’s death,” we are told in Literature and Dogma, “is almost certainly an addition after the event, because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus.”  Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the “manner of Jesus.”  It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them.  External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ’s existence and death, we have none.  So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is “in the manner of Jesus,” and then black-mark the rest as being not so.  Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed ad absurdum, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the Histoire d’Israel, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer.  But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.