God and the Bible tells much the same tale.  It originally appeared by instalments in the Contemporary Review, where it must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that then young and thoughtful periodical.  Unless the replier has the vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, “replies, duplies, quadruplies” are apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a veles than a triarius of controversy.  He could harass, but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to destroy each other.  He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more.  He wished to prove, in his own remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold.  One must be stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to metaphysical theologians.  But this interest is only passing.

In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness.  Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the Anti-Jacobin.  But the apologist is not really light-hearted:  he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam’s fall “is all a legend.  It never really happened, any of it.”  Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, “How do you know that?  On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence, how is it possible for you to know that?  You may, on your principles, say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it did happen; but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you will not admit) say that it did not? Surely there is some want of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law and logic, of history and of common-sense?”

But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious.  Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably:  and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.