A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite; but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them.  To ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far.  They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency.  Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more.  Yet we have not quite done with the other fruits themselves.

The actual finale, Last Essays on Church and Religion, was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted.  It is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his books which can be definitely called dull.  The apologetic tone noticeable in God and the Bible continues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner.  The Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series.  Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogma, bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all.  And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort:  “Certainly.  These men are at any rate ‘thorough’; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions.  They have got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived at their destination.  We have no desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house.”  It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of “Jesus,” and another, given by the same authority, as not that of “Jesus.”  A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold’s views on Church and Religion at all.

But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this deserts us.  The text contains four (or five, the second being divided into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, A Psychological Parallel, Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist, The Church of England_, and A Last Word on the Burials Bill.  All had appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine or the Contemporary Review during 1876, while Bishop Butler had been delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and The Church of England as an address to the London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.