[Illustration:  Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, from the Lawn]

The articles of which the foregoing pages give the substance were published in the Cornhill Magazine for October and November, 1869.  On November 13, Arnold wrote with glee that the organs of the Independent and the Baptist Churches showed that he had “entirely reached the special Puritan class he meant to reach.”  “Whether,” he said, “I have rendered St. Paul’s ideas with perfect correctness or not, there is no doubt that the confidence with which these people regarded their conventional rendering of them was quite baseless, made them narrow and intolerant, and prevented all progress.  I shall have a last paper at Christmas, called Puritanism and the Church of England, to show how the Church, though holding certain doctrines like justification in common with Puritanism, has gained by not pinning itself to those doctrines and nothing else, but by resting on Catholic antiquity, historic Christianity, development, and so on, which open to it an escape from all single doctrines as they are outgrown.”

That “last paper” appeared in due course, and it stated the position of the Church of England as the historical and continuous Church in this land, with an uncompromising directness which would have satisfied Bishop Stubbs or Professor Freeman.  With equal directness, it affirmed that Protestantism, “with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul’s wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine.”  It traced, briefly but very clearly, the history and development of the Universal Church, justified the Church of England in separating from Rome on account of Rome’s moral corruptions, condemned the Nonconformists for separating on the mere ground of opinion, extolled the comprehensiveness and simplicity of Anglican formularies, and suggested to the Dissenters that, if they would only swallow their objections to Episcopacy and rejoin the Church of England, they might greatly strengthen the national organization for promoting Religion.  In doing this they would only obey the natural instinct which bids all Christians worship together. “Securus colit orbis terrarum”—­those pursue the purpose best who pursue it together.  For, unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church’s growth shows, to pursue it together.”

The two papers on St. Paul and Protestantism together with that on Puritanism and the Church of England were published in 1870 in a single volume bearing the former title, and to this volume Arnold prefixed a preface, enforcing his doctrine with some vigorous hits at a dissenting Member of Parliament called Winterbotham, for glorying in an attitude of “watchful jealousy”; at Mill for his “almost feminine vehemence of irritation” against the Church of England, at Fawcett for his “mere blatancy and truculent hardness.”  He concluded by re-affirming his main object in this theological controversy.  “To disengage the religion of England from unscriptural Protestantism, political Dissent, and a spirit of watchful jealousy, may be an aim not in our day reachable, and still it is well to level at it.”