In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful.  It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily.  Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled.  So he must be got rid of.  But whether he is got rid of,—­whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object,—­that is another question.

The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body.  The circumstances of the first—­the address delivered at Sion College—­had a certain piquancy:  whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated.  Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque.  The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend.  How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length.  He thought himself that he had “sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached.”  Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed.  The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence.  The Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights of property and “my duty to my neighbour,” and as much as possible of the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself.  A most moderate eirenicon.  Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had been referred to.  The particular question, in this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb the ashes.

We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing.  The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted Friendship’s Garland, which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic.  It so happened that the period when Essays in Criticism, combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of