Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that “miracles do not happen.”  Alas! it is Mr Arnold’s unhappy lot that if miracles do happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless.  Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers in the supernatural, the supernatural means.  He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, “Now really, you know, these tests are destructive.”  He says—­he cannot prove—­that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, “Apres?” Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters? that He shall give “a good title,” like a man who is selling a house?  Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His acts.  And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they do worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of a prophet of Mr Arnold’s own—­

  “Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst,
  Nicht Mir!”

But this is not all.  There is not only begging of the question but ignoring of the issue. Literature and Dogma, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive book.  It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive—­to provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall.  This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature—­that is to say, a delicate aesthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct—­that is to say, a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though more amiable.  If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence; and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once (and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still.  Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.

Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work.  The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, “are not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser.”  Nobody wants a religion of that sort.  Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is perhaps better, though not for the general.  But then religion happens to be something different from either, though no doubt