Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book.  The writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even flattering himself that some modus vivendi is about to be established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent and weariness—­nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale’s views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles’s excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one).  Of course the argument is sun-clear.  If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the Resurrection.  Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the Book of Enoch, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c.  And it would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself.  No believer in supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them His.

The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered.  In particular, it requires rather careful “collection” in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley.  I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold’s hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift.  Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself.  If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this.  If it is a sort of indirect attack upon—­an oblique demurrer to—­Butler’s constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of impar congressus, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance.  It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that!